The Soviet Union has been in its grave for nearly twenty years, but Dot SU, its country code top-level domain (ccTLD) celebrated its 19th anniversary last month, and despite ICANN’s attempts to kill, it looks healthier. never. Dot YU, the Yugoslavia ccTLD that had already departed, was eliminated two years ago, but Dot SU refuses to disappear.
Dot RU is the ccTLD of the newly reborn Russia. RU Center is the approved registrar for both SU and RU. The Russian bureaucracy has been trying to get rid of Dot Su for at least the last decade. In 2001, for example, they increased the registration price of an SU extension to $ 15,000 USD. That, needless to say, dampened the enthusiasm of most potential buyers; But enthusiasts and sympathetic officials forced a change and in a year or so the price dropped to a hundred dollars. Today you can buy one at the RU Center for 600 rubles, between $ 20 and $ 25.
Growth at Dot SU has been slow. At the beginning of the millennium there were less than 25,000 domain names; today there are close to eighty thousand, a pittance compared to the ccTLD sales of countries that are a fraction of the size of Russia. The Netherlands, for example, has more than three million sales of Dot NL; this in a country of less than twenty million.
While anyone can buy a Dot SU extension, ninety-two percent of the 80,000 are reported to be in Russia. If that’s the case, then there must be a lot of Russians interested in the English language. I did a fair amount of domain name searches on common English words and a lot was taken; not all, however, as I was able to find four letter words (not that kind!) that were available. Some of the words that are still available could even be commercially valuable later, if Dot SU survives. Remember, ICANN wants it to go away, so be careful before taking your credit card!
What do you think keeps the extension alive? Nostalgia? Or perhaps a desperate hope among a dwindling number of true believers that history has not ended with the Soviet Union? Is Dot Su a particularly Russian version of “Save your Confederate Money guys, the South will rise again”?