Tomorrow, on September 19, 2020, the domain .SU, one of the oldest ccTLDs in the world, celebrates its 30th anniversary. On September 19, 1990, the InterNIC database added a new record about the new top-level domain .SU (Soviet Union). At the request of SUUG (Soviet UNIX User’s Group), the domain for the use in the USSR was registered by Vadim Antonov, one of the founders of the Demos cooperative.
The domain .SU probably has the most turbulent history. Less than a year after its registration, the Soviet Union broke up and all the legal issues related to the domain registration were dealt with later, only in 1993. The rights to manage .SU were given to the Russian Institute of Public Networks (RIPN), established in 1992 under the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. In 1994, the .RU national Russian top-level domain was created and the .SU domain zone was ‘frozen’ but a decision was made not to get rid of it (like it was with the domains of Czechoslovakia, .CS, and Yugoslavia, .YU), but to preserve it for “an indefinite period.”
In 2000, the Foundation for Internet Development as a manager of the domain in late 2002 unfroze the .SU domain and resumed registration of domain names in it.
On January 31, 2007, a public discussion took place between the foundation and ICANN. On September 19, 2007, foundation representatives held a news conference and announced the results of the discussion: the fate of the domain depended on regulating the SU code in the official ISO list of geographical codes 3166-1, which IANA uses to delegate geographical domains.
In late June 2008, the ISO3166/MA Committee of the International Organization for Standardization decided to give .SU a status of a reserved domain, which guaranteed that it would not be used for other purposes, thus preserving the domain.
The efforts to develop the domain, which on the year of its 30th anniversary became managed by RIPN again, were not in vain. The domain now has an impressive 110,000 registered domain names, with over 90 percent of them being delegated.
Speaking about the positioning of the domain zone, experts often call it a historical, territorial (Eurasia) or multi-language. .SU is one of the most active promoters of the Cyrillic alphabet on the internet: it allowed the registration of domain names in national languages even before the appearance of the first Cyrillic domain. РФ. In April 2008, .SU lifted the restriction of registration of domain names with the xn-- prefix, which allowed for entering part of the address in the browser address bar using the national character set, including the Russian language. In August 2008, 37 new Cyrillic characters were added to the list. Thus, the national languages of the Russian peoples were supported: it is now possible to register names in the Altai, Bashkir, Buryat, Dolgan, Kalmyk, Komi, Koryak, Mari, Nanai, Nenets, Ossetian, Saami (without the length of vowels), Tatar, Tuvan, Udmurt, Khakas, Khanty, Chuvash, Evenki, Even and Yakut languages.
The .SU domain can be rightfully called the symbol of a multi-language and multicultural internet that unites various languages and peoples and preserves the cultural diversity in the virtual space. The oldest domain on the post-Soviet space now unites the information field of the former Soviet republics while continuing to grow and develop.
We congratulate .SU on its 30th anniversary and wish it prosperity and success!
