NEW YORK, NY — With so much controversy continuing to grind away over whether the .xxx domain extension should be offered — or forced — upon America’s adult internet website owners, little attention has been paid to the lonely domains that have outlived their questionable purpose. Won’t somebody think about the “.um’s?””.um” is only one of a collection of domains that the University of Southern California’s Information Services Institute (ISI) has gotten sick and tired of handholding and keeping safe on the off chance someone decides to actually use them. Although the role of domain caretaker went to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1998, some, including “.um” stayed with the ISI.
It was only last month that ICANN began soliciting opinions about which suffixes were outdated and should be removed, sometimes because the countries associated with them no longer exist. Now anyone from any of the U.S’s “minor outlying islands” will have to find something other than “.um” to put at the end of their website name, not that anyone had bothered to add it up to this point.
This largely unnoticed change to the internet’s landscape came after ICANN unanimously decided to shorten the domain list to a mere 264.
Guam’s “.gu” is still available, as is the U.S. Virgin Island’s “.vi” The Soviet Union’s “.su” is headed for the executioner’s block, however, which may come as a shock to the three million web entities still using it. Also going the way of the dinosaur is Great Britain’s non-selling “.gb,” which simply couldn’t compete with the popular “.uk” preferred by those in the United Kingdom.
Politics make strange but important web indicators, which is why the former Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Montenegro, which are moving from their previous “.yu” and “.su” designators, after being given the discarded “.cs” country code, which used to belong to Czechoslovakia, which lost interest in using it once it broke off from the Czech Republic (“.cz”) and Slovakia (“.sk”). Unless the countries further divide, they’ll soon be able to use “.rs” and “.me.”
In other news, East Timor has already dropped its old “.tp” in order to embrace “.tl,” although at least 150,000 site owners haven’t yet made the switch. East Germany’s “.dd” is old hat, as is Zaire’s “.zr,” now that the country calls itself the Democratic Republic of the Congo (“.cd”).
Although ICANN’s decision during its Sao Paulo, Brazil, meeting has made things marginally less cluttering and confusing, that isn’t expected to last, although it is accepting comments until January 31st about how to set up a formal country code assignment policy. While adding domain names including Europe’s “.eu” and the travel industry’s “.travel,” considering an international organization designation of “int,” and courting massive controversy over a proposed all-adult “.xxx,” any more deletions will probably take at least a year, if not more, in order to let stragglers make the change.
Next up? Rules on how to add new domains — including those that use non-English characters.
