I get a wrongful kicking as .su registry denies turn-off plan

The registry for the former Soviet Union’s .su ccTLD has denied that ICANN plans to kick it off the internet, giving three reasons why its over 100,000 domains are safe.

RosNIIROS pointed to Russian law, ICANN ccTLD policy, and the lack of any formal retirement notice as reasons why the ccTLD isn’t going anywhere. The registry said in a post on its web site:

In connection with the media reports about the possible closure of the .SU domain zone, we inform you that this information periodically appears in the public domain, but does not correspond to reality. The registry (RosNIIROS) does not plan to liquidate the .SU domain and no formal actions have been taken by ICANN

The registry said that .su has been formally recognised under Russian law, via a ruling of the telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor, alongside .ru and .рф, as part of the “Russian national domain zone”.

It added that ICANN policy does not permit the Org to retire .su:

According to the procedure approved in 2022 by ICANN, a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) can be removed from the DNS root zone only if the corresponding two-letter code is excluded from the ISO 3166 standard. Currently, the code “SU” is included in the ISO 3166 list with the status of “exclusively reserved”

The machine translation may be a bit wonky there, as the term used in English is “exceptionally reserved”. That’s the ISO 3166 status also enjoyed by the UK (.uk), Ascension Islands (.ac) and European Union (.eu).

But the ICANN policy on retiring ccTLDs specifically calls out .uk, .ac and .eu as being “grandfathered” in. It doesn’t mention .su at all, and it’s not at all clear from my reading whether being “exceptionally reserved” offers .su blanket protection.

ICANN’s former chair didn’t seem to think so in 2022 when he said, “the Soviet Union is no longer assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard and therefore is no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD.”

RosNIIROS also referred its customers to the recent comments of ICANN director Becky Burr, who on March 12 had denied that ICANN had kicked off formal retirement proceedings.

I hadn’t listened to this session live, but I caught up with the recording today and have to say it’s a bit of an eye-opener. Burr said:

Let me just take the elephant in the room. We all saw the Domain Incite report on .su. I just want to say to everybody, there has been no formal letter kicking off any process on there, that’s clear. We are looking at the ccNSO policy, and I don’t want to say anything more about that other than to say whatever was in the Domain Incite article, there has been no formal initiation of a retirement process

I’m not sure whether to be irritated or flattered.

On the one hand, I seem to have received a public dressing down with the clear implication that there was some inaccuracy in my reporting, which is never nice. On the other hand, I didn’t write the damned article she’s referring to.

Burr seems to have read Domain Name Wire’s wonderful scoop on “plans to retire the [.su] domain” and just assumed it was my work. I’ll have to take it as a compliment, I guess. Cheers Becky!

The DNW article reported from the outset that a planned notice of retirement had not yet been sent, but that informal outreach had occurred, so I don’t even think there’s a clear allegation of inaccuracy here. For what it’s worth, I trust the reporting.

The day after Burr’s comment, ICANN CEO Kurt Lindqvist also said publicly that there had not yet been a “formal” notice of retirement.

“No timeline” to retire Soviet Union from the DNS

There is currently “no timeline” to remove the Soviet Union’s ccTLD from the internet, according to ICANN’s new CEO.

Asked by yours truly during the Public Forum at ICANN 82 whether retirement proceedings had been initiated against .su, Kurt Lindqvist responded, according to the real-time transcript:

ICANN has been in discussions with the managers of .su regarding retirement of the ccTLD for many, many years. There has not been sent a formal notice of removal to the ccTLD manager and no timeline for sending one, discussions will be keep on going and following the ccNSO retirement policy.

The words “formal notice of removal” might be doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Domain Name Wire scooped earlier this week that on February 8 ICANN had privately told Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks (ROSNIIROS), the .su registry, that it planned to retire the ccTLD by 2030.

DNW noted that a formal notice of removal had been due to be sent and published February 13, but had not.

With Lindqvist today saying that there is “no timeline for sending one”, it seems the matter might have been put to bed for now.

It would have been an incredibly ballsy move to start the process of taking down .su — beloved by Russians and groups in Russian-occupied Ukraine — at this particular point in history.

At the time DNW reported ICANN’s letter to ROSNIIROS was sent, US president Donald Trump had yet to publicly begin peace talks with Russia and Ukraine, but his openly pro-Russian statements on the conflict since his February 12 phone call with Vladimir Putin have alarmed many.

Trump probably isn’t an FSB asset, but he certainly plays one on TV.

Would ICANN want to risk pissing off the unpredictable leader of the country whose jurisdiction it lies within? Or Russia, which might try to make its life difficult in other internet governance fora?

Three years ago, at ICANN 73, ICANN’s then-chair said that the Soviet Union, which disbanded over 30 years ago, is “no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD”.

I first floated the idea of ICANN taking down .su the day after the 2022 Ukraine invasion.

Bahrain to relaunch ccTLD globally

The government of Bahrain has announced that it is relaunching its .bh and البحرين. ccTLDs with a simplified, automated, standardized registration process.

The domains will be available globally, the local Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said: “The new process of registration is fast, simple, and secure cutting the time of registration from days to minutes.”

Names will be “available for local and international customers”, the TRA said.

It looks like Bahrain has switched its back-end to CentralNic, and will be operating a standard EPP system.

While launch dates, registration rules and participating registrars were not announced, the TRA did indicate that the launch would begin with a sunrise period for trademark owners some time in the fourth quarter.

Bahrain is small but wealthy island state in the Persian Gulf with about 1.5 million inhabitants. The number of current registrations in .bh is not known.

Three millionth .it name registered

Italian ccTLD .it has topped three million domains for the first time, according to registry Registro.it.
The milestone name was abbigliamentoludica.it, seemingly a clothes shop. It appears to have been registered November 25.
The registry announced the news in English last week.
It appears that growth is slowing somewhat over the long term. The ccTLD hit one million in 2005 and two million in 2010, but it’s taken six years to get to the next big landmark.
.it seems to have started the year with 2,869,010 domains under management, according to its stats page.
It currently has 3,002,135 domains under management, according to the web site.

One and two-letter .at domains coming soon

Nic.at will next month start selling .at domains shorter than three character domains for the first time.
All one-character and two-character domains will be released, the ccTLD registry said, about 5,000 domains in total.
The released domains include those containing any of the 34 non-Latin letters Nic.at supports, it said.
Holders of trademarks valid in Austria before July 1 get the first crack at the names, during a August 29 to September 23 sunrise period.
During this phase, domains will cost €240 ($265) with a €120 ($132) application fee. Contested sunrise names will be auctioned in October.
Everything not grabbed by trademark interests will be put to a public auction from November 7, where the minimum bid will be €72 ($79).
If there’s anything left after that, it will be released into the general available pool for registration at standard .at prices.
Nic.at plans to dump all registered one and two-character domains into the .at zone file, so they can be used, at the same time on December 6.
Austria has no local presence requirements for ccTLD registration.
Given “at” has some semantic value in English, it could be a popular launch.

After long battle, first Bulgarian IDN domain goes live

Bulgarians finally have the ability to register domain names in their native Cyrillic script, after years of fighting with ICANN.
The domain Имена.бг, which translates as “names.bg” went live on the internet this week, according to local reports.
Bulgaria was one of the first countries to ask for a internationalized domain name version of its ccTLD, almost seven years ago, but it was rejected by ICANN in 2010.
The requested .бг was found too similar to Brazil’s existing Latin-script ccTLD .br. Evaluators thought the risk of phishing and other types of attacks was too high.
The requested string didn’t change, but ICANN processes were adapted to allow appeals and a new method for establishing similarity was established.
On appeal, .бг was determined to be less prone to confusion with .br than existing pairs of Latin ccTLDs are with each other, ergo should be approved.
Имена.бг does not yet directly resolve (for me at least) from the Google Chrome address bar. It’s treated as a web search instead. But clicking on links to it does work.
The new ccTLD, which is .xn--90ae in the DNS, was delegated last week.
The registry is Imena.bg (which also means “names.bg”), based in Sofia and partially owned by Register.bg, the .bg registry.
Despite the long battle, the success of .бг is by no means assured. IDNs have a patchy record worldwide.
It’s true that Russians went nuts for their .рф (.rf for Russian Federation) ccTLD during its scandal-rocked launch in 2010, but Arabic IDNs have had hardly any interest and the current boom in China seems to be largely concentrated on Latin-script TLDs.
.бг is expected to open for general registration in the fourth quarter.
I guess we’ll have to wait until at least next year to discover whether the concerns about confusion with .br were well-founded.

Bulgaria polls public for Cyrillic TLD ideas

The Bulgarian government is asking its people what Cyrillic top-level domain it should ask for if ICANN refuses to reverse its rejection of .бг.
The Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology has published a poll on its web site, presenting four options for an IDN ccTLD.
Its first choice, .бг, was rejected by ICANN/IANA in May due to its visual similarity to another ccTLD, believed to be Brazil’s .br.
The four new options are .бгр, .българия, .бя and .бъл.
Bulgarians can also vote for “nothing but .бг” or declare that they do not want a Cyrillic domain at all.
The poll page, via Google Translate, suggests that the Ministry is prepared to wait for another opportunity to apply for .бг or for an ICANN appeals process to be created, if that’s what the public wants.
The Minister had previously promised to appeal the rejection of .бг.
(First reported by Novinite.)