Saturday, 18 April 2009

DNS hosting for .su (Soviet Union) IDN domains

I've just put the first IDN domain on FreeNameServers.co.uk, a mere 600 Rubles (£12) from NIC.RU/EN.

The domain is бесплатныесмс.su, ("Besplatnye SMS") which resolves via puny code to http://www.xn--80abmb2aifnrfbh2j.su/ - The .su TLD actually refers to the Soviet Union, which is a TLD that ICANN is trying to revoke at the moment, at the behest of the Russian NIC.

The official TLD of Russia is .ru, but Google still recognises .su as a official domain name, and my personal feeling that trying to uproot 17 Million websites (search site:.su in Google), would be something that the Russian NIC wouldn't do lightly.

Furthermore, NIC.ru is only selling IDN domains for .su, not .ru. Which is a bit wierd.

No comments: