The continued existence issue of the .SU domain was once again raised at the ICANN 73 meeting, which took place last week in an online format. The question of the legitimacy of the .SU domain zone of the Soviet Union was raised by a well-known expert in the domain industry, Kevin Murphy.
As you know, after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which is in charge of the disposal of country and territory codes, assigned the status of "temporary" to the SU code. This meant that after a certain period it would be subject to deletion, which would (most likely) lead to the retirement of the .SU domain as well. However, later, as a result of negotiations between contemporary administrators of the .SU domain zone with the management of ISO and ICANN, the status of the SU code was changed to "exceptional reserved".
This means that the code can persist indefinitely. It can be added that, for example, the code of the European Union EU has a similar status in the ISO standard, although formally the EU, of course, is not a single state.
ICANN 73 participants were reminded that the ICANN Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) has submitted a draft document to the ICANN Board to guide the retirement of country code domains. "We are pleased to announce that the ccNSO has recently finalized policy work and we will review and evaluate these recommendations shortly," said Maarten Bottermann, Chairman of the Board of the Corporation.
The adoption of the new policy, which is expected in the near future, raised a new wave of discussions on the status of the .SU domain. And here it is important to note that the status of the SU code “exceptional reserved”, even after the adoption of new rules for the decommissioning of two-letter top-level domains, allows us to talk about the possible indefinite preservation of the .SU domain precisely in the community of country-specific two-letter top-level domains, in whose policy ICANN practically does not interfere.
Today more than 100 thousand domain names are registered in the .SU zone, the registry of the .SU domain is Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN) since 2020.
