Back in the USSR — Soviet Web domain name resists death
Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising — registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts to extinguish the online Soviet outpost.
Russian nostalgia for the Soviet empire is part of the story. Nashi, or "Ours," is a pro-Kremlin youth group that gained notoriety for raucous protests against Kremlin critics. The group loyally praises President Vladimir Putin at "nashi.su," though it denies its choice of the ".su" domain was meant to send a political message.
Many Web entrepreneurs also see potential profits in the domain, grabbing instantly recognizable names already claimed in other, better known domains.
A small Moscow car repair shop that specializes in Ford vehicles boasts a home page at "ford.su," while the owner of "apple.su" is a Muscovite who said he is ready to swap it for a new laptop computer — and not necessarily a Mac from Apple Inc.
While Khramov insists he "did not buy it for reselling," others are out to make a quick ruble. Yan Balayan registered a number of high-profile addresses, including "ussr.su," "stalin.su" and "kgb.su" — he's asking for $30,000 each but stands ready to haggle.
With few exceptions — namely, the tech-savvy Baltic state of Estonia — Internet penetration is relatively low in the former Soviet republics. Russia's Public Opinion Foundation says that only 27 percent of Russian adults use the Internet — and only about 12 percent of the adults on any given day.
Yet many Internet entrepreneurs are passionate about the ".su" domain, even as others are scornful of it as a relic of the past, saying it doesn't deserve the same status as ".ru" for Russia, ".uk" for the United Kingdom or ".fr" for France.
"They are selling tickets to a drowning ship," said Anton Nosik, a veteran Web journalist and founder of several successful online projects. "Their message is to losers and latecomers."
What's next? Domain names for the Roman Empire or Ancient Greece?
Country-code domains, derived from a list kept by the International Organization for Standardization, typically disappear when a country ceases to exist or changes its name. Both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia lost their domain names after they broke up into smaller nations. So did Zaire after it became the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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