.SU DOMAIN HISTORY

SU domain is the domain of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It appeared in the Internet space on 19 September 1990, when it was registered in the InterNIC database by the Soviet Union Association of UNIX Users (SUUG). In 1993 the SU domain administration was entrusted to the then established Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN).

By the moment the Russian domain RU appeared in 1994, domain zone SU growth was mainly due to business structures, and by the time there were already several thousand unique records. However, with the Russian national zone emergence the registration for new second-level domains in SU was discontinued and the zone itself had to be retired, as it happened with domains in Czechoslovakia (.CS) and Yugoslavia (.YU). Despite this, SU zone continued to grow with third-level domains and by 1998 the number of hosts in it reached 30,000. In 2001 the Internet Development Fund, which performed then under agreement with RIPN as the domain registry, tried to resume open domain registration in the SU, but the attempt was bumped by the ongoing at that time in Russia cybersquatting boom, when catchy domains were a real hunt for. In connection with this, a very high cost for domain registration in the SU was then set at $15,000. Within six months, it was reduced to $100, but due to insufficient legal framework, new domain registration in the SU was again suspended as requested by the Russian Ministry of Communications. During the same period, the Russian Open Forum of Service Providers attempted to forcibly close the SU zone by writing an appeal to ICANN with a proposal to designate the domain's status as destined for retirement. The undertaking was not a success and opinion polls showed that about 75% of users supported the idea to keep and develop the SU domain.

On 15 December 2002 in the SU domain opened priority registration for trademark holders, and on 27 June 2003 the free registration for second-level domains began. Since 2007 registration prices have fallen steadily, resulting in a significant increase in domain numbers in the SU zone. Currently, the domain number exceeds 100,000. The zone has implemented DNSSEC support and the possibility to register IDN multilingual domains