Birthday of SU TLD

On the 19-th of September domain SU (the Soviet Union) celebrated its 19 years' anniversary. Domain SU has been delegated to the USSR in 1990 - a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union and 3,5 years before the creation of Russian ccTLD RU, that is considered as ".SU successor".

"Domain SU was not delegated to the Soviet Union (although technically it was so). At that time, when the Soviet Union began to collapse, delegation meant the birth of new Internet community. So in fact, domain SU was like a guide and even a symbol of democratic development", - says Alexei Platonov, Director of Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN), which is still playing the role of the Technical Center of domain SU.

During its history domain SU had several key milestones. It is important to remember the five-fold reduction in the cost of registration in 2007, implementation of IDN support in 2008 and then conferring to the official international "SU code" status "exclusively reserved" by ISO. All events mentioned above caused the quantitative growth in number of registrations in 2007 - 2008.

According to the statistics provided by web-site Stat.nic.ru, today more than 80 000 names are registered in ccTLD SU. The domain demonstrated 600% increase in 2008. Unfortunately, last year the growth of registrations in domain SU significantly decreased. The overwhelming majority of domain names in ccTLD SU are registered by the residents of Moscow (nearly 52%), Moscow Region (10%) and St. Petersburg (8%). By the way, the largest number of .SU names (92%) are registered by Russian residents, remaining 8% - by foreigners and international companies from USA, Ukraine, Belize, Kazakhstan, Belarus, France, UK etc.

Names in "The Soviet Union domain" can be registered using the symbols of 250 national languages. About 18 000 IDN-domains already exist in ccTLD SU, most of them in Russian - 14 500. Among popular symbols are also Greek, Arabic and Hebrew.

The role of the registry for ccTLD SU is performed by Russian non-commercial organization the Foundation for Internet Development. RU-CENTER occupies leading positions on the market among registrars in SU, providing about 60% of all registrations in the domain.