[BRIEF NOTE] (A) Soviet Union lives!

[rfmcdonald]

I'd read somewhere that the Soviet Union's top-level domain, .su, remained active long after that state's 1991 dissolution. What I didn't know, and what Mansur Mirovalev's Associated Press article "Back in the USSR: Soviet Internet domain name resists death" told me, is that .su is thriving.

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.

Vladimir Khramov, a network administrator from Moscow, said he bought "microsoft.su" last year simply to acquire an easy-to-remember ending for his e-mail address.

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."

The January reduction in prices for .su sites by nearly 80% has led to a quadrupling of the number of websites associated with the .su country code. While notable, this still only amounts to something like 4% of the number of websites associated with the .ru country code.

When I first heard of it, I, like many of the people at Slashdot, had ascribed the continued use of the .su country code to nostalgia for the Soviet Union, and to some extent this is confirmed by Mirovalev's article. He also suggests another, more interesting, motive.

Champions of the online Soviet domain say there is still plenty of room for growth.

Some envisage the ".su" domain as a virtual venue for those who fondly recall the old Soviet Union as a place where Russian, the lingua franca of the Soviet empire, knit together a host of Asian and European ethnic groups and cultures.

And by late April, the ".su" domain plans to start allowing names in Russian; currently such names are limited to English letters, numerals and the hyphen.

This puts it into an altogether new light for me. Might many current users of .su be using that domain as for the Russophone world, in much the same way that Catalanophones use .cat for their lingusitic community?