A meeting of the ICANN Board of Directors is scheduled for the coming weekend. The corporation’s management will vote on whether to delegate a new ccTLD. The decision may result in heated debates and political conflicts. The issue itself would be nothing out of the ordinary, if not for the name of the domain zone - .SS.
South Sudan, the youngest of the currently existing officially recognized states, has applied for the .SS TLD. The UN recognized the independence of this African country in the summer of 2011. At the same time, the ISO assigned the official two-letter code, SS, to South Sudan. English is the official language of the country, and therefore the choice of code was quite obvious, based on the English name South Sudan. Even then, many political and public figures argued that such an abbreviation was unacceptable. The abbreviation SS in most languages is primarily associated with Schutzstaffel, the Nazi Party’s German assault troops, which also ran death camps.
For some time, the problem took a back seat. South Sudan is one of the poorest and least-developed countries; the nation has been plagued by a civil war, famine and epidemics for many years. However, now the government has returned to the issue and intends to acquire a national domain. There is no easy solution to this problem. On the one hand, according to Domain Incite, ICANN cannot object to such a domain name, as long as the SS abbreviation for South Sudan was approved by the ISO. On the other hand, it is obvious that the public will have an extremely negative reaction to the delegation of such a domain, and many neo-Nazi organizations will not pass up the opportunity to register their names in the .SS domain zone.
