By granting the old Soviet Union's country code SU " exceptionally reserved" status, ISO has made sure its future as an Internet suffix is also secured.
Much has been made of the tussle between ICANN and Russia over .SU. Assigned as the country code top-level domain for the Soviet Union on September 19, 1990, two years before the Soviet Union collapsed, .SU is still actively used today.
But in 2007, ICANN pushed for the suffix to be phased out. In so doing, the Internet's overseer was only following standard policy for country codes which are dropped from the International Organization for Standardization's official list for reasons ranging from countries changing their names to simply disappearing (as was the case for East Germany's DD code for example).
.SU's planned extinction raised waves of protests from exiting users and the extension's registry. The dispute has been escalating since, with the registry openly defying ICANN and claiming that it would continue to operate the suffix, "no matter what".
In June, ISO itself provided both parties with an elegant way out by re-introducing the SU code in its list as "exceptionally reserved". ISO has a provision for codes to be identified as non-active but still remain listed when special circumstances dictate. One example is EU, which is not a country code but is still exceptionally reserved for the European Union and therefore included in the ISO country code list.
There are 72 382 registered .SU domains, a number which compares with the 1 597 305 .RU domains registered in Russia's current country code.
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