ICANN announced this week the approval of two new domain extensions, .RS for Serbia and .ME for Montenegro. The new operators have agreed with ICANN to migrate their users across from the former .YU (Yugoslavia) extension.

While the .YU domain was conceded fairly easily, ICANN are now faced with a tougher fight to remove .SU (Soviet Union). Deletion of the extension has been widely discussed this year, with ICANN holding a public discussion in San Paulo in January with the .SU and .YU extensions topping the agenda. Previous to this ICANN made public statements during 2003 that the .SU domain would be decommissioned, with an estimated time-frame of one year.

This is not the first time ICANN have deleted retired an extension, Great Britain’s .GB, was replaced by .UK, East Germany’s .DD and Zaire’s .ZR after the country became the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

However supporters of the .SU domain have pointed out that this extension is far from obsolete and actively protested the recent San Paulo discussions. Figures released by the .SU lobbyists show there are nearly 10,000 registered Web sites with the domain name and around 1,500 new ones have been added this year.

The options for the future of .SU as laid out by ICANN are pretty stark. The operators can appeal to have .SU reintroduced into the UN’s ISO 3166-1 standard, have it recognised as an ‘exceptionally reserved’ code like “EU” or move existing users to a new three letter domain, such as .CAT (for Catalan speakers). The first two options are unlikely to succeed as the UN removed .SU from the ISO 3166-1 list in 1992 when they recognised the Russian Federation. The second option is unlikely to please current .SU owners as they would loose investments in branding and search engine placement.

ICANN has again, “urged the current .SU operators to make it clear to the .SU registrants the issues surrounding the domain, as well as to freeze new registrations until its future is clear” .

It doesn’t seem that the .SU operators are listening though. This week they announced that they would be celebrating their 17th anniversary with an 80% price cut starting in November and plans for IDN .SU. This would bring the pricing for .SU into line with .RU and boost the number registered. As Lenta.ru writes:

Blast area. SU (abbreviation Soviet Union-former Soviet Union) has been considered a “risky zone” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the international corporation ICANN seeking to close the zone. Registration in the zone now exceeds 3 million rubles [$120’000), which is several times greater than name registration in other areas. As a result of public discussion, it was decided not to close the extension.

While the .SU operators are keen to stress “relations are friendly”, this dispute is gaining momentum.