States die quickly. Flags come down, seals are broken, passports voided. But in the DNS root zone—the very database on which all internet addressing rests—no one lowers flags, because there were never any there.
19 September 1990 saw a new entry appear in the InterNIC database: .su—a country-code top-level domain for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At that moment, the global DNS infrastructure was itself barely a teenager: only a handful of root servers, a few dozen country domain zones, and most of the planet had no idea it could even have an internet address. The USSR entered this world—last among the superpowers and, as it turned out, not for long.
The story was set in motion by Petri Ojala, a nineteen-year-old Finnish student who proposed delegating a zone to the Soviet Union. The .ussr option was considered at first, but the ISO 3166-1 standard, which assigns two-letter country codes, dictated otherwise: SU. Registration was taken on by the Soviet UNIX User Group (SUUG)—an organization bringing together those few people in the USSR for whom the words “network protocol” meant a working tool rather than science fiction. The domain was born in an era when the Soviet internet consisted of a few nodes connected by modem lines, and a handful of enthusiasts who understood what was happening.
What fascinates me is this: fifteen months and seven days passed between the delegation of .su and the collapse of the USSR. The domain was granted to a country already cracking at the seams. Lithuania had declared independence six months earlier. But DNS is a system with no ear for politics. It registers entries; it does not read the tectonics of empires.
26 December 1991 saw the Council of Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopt a declaration ending the existence of the Soviet Union. The red flag over the Kremlin had been lowered the day before. The SU code disappeared from the ISO 3166-1 standard as early as 1992. But the .su entry in the DNS root zone stayed right where it was—untouched by anyone, bothering no one, quietly doing its job.
The most common misconception is this: if the country vanished, someone must have had to press the “delete” button. But DNS works differently. The root zone is not an atlas of the world; it is a registry of delegations. An entry there says one thing: “this administrator is responsible for this zone; contact their name servers.” The presence of .su in the root zone did not mean international recognition of the USSR, just as the removal of the SU code from the ISO standard did not mean anyone was obliged to immediately pull the plug.
In the early nineties, ICANN did not yet exist—it would not appear until 1998. There were neither formalized procedures for shutting down country domains nor precedents: until then, no countries with top-level domains had disappeared. The .su domain found itself in a legal and administrative vacuum. There was no one to close it—and no one to hand it over to.
In 1993, administration of the zone passed from SUUG to the Russian Institute for Public Networks (RosNIIROS, also known as RIPN). The logic was pragmatic: Russia was the legal successor to the USSR, and RIPN was an organization with technical expertise and server infrastructure. A year later, in 1994, the .ru domain appeared—Russia’s own. The original plan was for .su to gradually wind down, making way for the new zone. But it went differently.
The .su zone was not accepting new second-level registrations—yet it lived on at the third level. Organizations that had received domains before the collapse continued using them, and subdomains proliferated within those domains. By 1998, the zone contained around 30,000 hosts—live, functioning addresses. It was like a house that stopped taking in new tenants, while the old ones had time to add attic extensions.
By the early 2000s, it had become clear: .su was a sleeping asset. In 2001, the Internet Development Foundation attempted to resume open registration of second-level domains and immediately ran into a cybersquatting boom—a short, recognizable address with history was becoming a coveted prize. That was why the starting threshold of $15,000 was deliberately set so high—to keep the zone from being picked clean in a day. Within the first six months, the price was steadily lowered to $100.
But then the state intervened. The Ministry of Communications of the Russian Federation demanded that registration be suspended, and it stopped once again. Meanwhile, an appeal from the Open Forum of Russian Service Providers went to ICANN—with a proposal to close the zone entirely. The arguments were clear: the country no longer existed, the code had been removed from ISO, so why maintain an artifact? But the polls spoke volumes: 75% of users came out in favor of preserving .su. By then, the domain had already accumulated a community, infrastructure and, bluntly speaking, habit.
ICANN did not decide on an immediate shutdown. There were several reasons, and none of them came down to “they forgot” or “they didn’t feel like it.” First, the zone contained active resources—their owners had legitimate interests. Second, the mechanism for liquidating country domains had not at that point been spelled out in ICANN policy with sufficient detail. Third, the precedent of forcibly removing a functioning zone would have sent a dangerous signal: any national domain could find itself under threat following political changes in its country.
15 December 2002 saw priority registration open for trademark owners, and on 27 June 2003—open second-level registration for anyone who wanted it. The ghost domain began growing again.
After 2003, the .su zone became a space where everything mixed together. Nostalgic projects—sites dedicated to Soviet history, culture and aesthetics—found their niche, but were never the majority. Businesses appreciated the short domain: two letters in the address bar instead of their competitors’ two, three or four. Media projects, political resources, personal blogs—the zone soaked up traffic like a sponge.
There was a dark side, too. Relatively lax registration rules and the absence of strict owner verification made .su an attractive platform for dubious resources: phishing pages, botnet command servers, malware distribution sites. The zone acquired a reputation that both undermined its legitimacy and—paradoxically—confirmed its viability: criminals go where the infrastructure works.
In May 2014, the Internet Development Foundation and Group-IB, a company specializing in cybercrime investigations, signed an agreement to counter cyberthreats in the domain zone. The mechanism made it possible to block domains used for attacks on an expedited basis—without lengthy bureaucratic procedures. It was a response to a specific problem, and it worked: the zone became cleaner, though by definition it is impossible to eliminate abuse entirely in any domain.
By 2025–2026, the .su zone contains more than 111–112 thousand active domains. That is not a record, but neither is it decline. By comparison, the .ru zone contains millions of entries, but .su is in another weight class and has another history. Here, every domain is a deliberate choice: the owner could have registered in .ru or .рф, but preferred an address with the aftertaste of a vanished era.
It would be a mistake to think of .su as a unique curiosity. The .yu domain (Yugoslavia) survived the country’s breakup until 2010, when it was finally removed from the root zone—but only after a years-long transition period and the creation of replacement domains .rs (Serbia) and .me (Montenegro). The .dd domain (East Germany) was reserved but never delegated—East Germany disappeared before it could receive a functioning zone. The .cs domain (Czechoslovakia) was removed in 1995. Every one of these cases is unique, and none precisely repeats the fate of .su.
The difference lies in the scale of use and political will. Yugoslavia’s domain was closed once all interested parties had alternatives and agreed to transition. Czechoslovakia’s—once both successor countries had acquired their own zones and did not object. With .su, the situation is different: Russia, as the USSR’s legal successor, has its own .ru, but tens of thousands of active domains in .su create an inertia that cannot be overcome by administrative decision without harming real users.
Here DNS lays bare a fundamental quality of digital infrastructure: it outlives its creators. Country calling codes change, postal codes are redrawn, currencies are withdrawn from circulation—but all of that happens in the physical world, where new forms can be printed and signs replaced. In DNS, every deletion means broken links, lost mail, somebody else’s services going down.
On 6 February 2025, the PTI/ICANN division notified RosNIIROS in a private letter of plans to retire .su by 2030. A public Notice of Removal was meant to follow—it was scheduled for 13 February, but the date passed and the notice never appeared. The correspondence only came to light in March, when the industry publication Domain Name Wire dug it up—and a wave swept through the professional community. The basis was ccNSO policy—the ICANN body responsible for country domains—regarding codes removed from the ISO 3166-1 standard. The SU code had been removed from that standard back in 1992—meaning the formal grounds for closure had existed for thirty-three years, but no one had used them.
Yet in March 2025, at the ICANN 82 conference, the organization’s CEO, Kurt Lindqvist, publicly stated that there were no formal timelines for retiring .su, and that no formal removal notice had been sent. What was it—a leaked working document, a trial balloon, bureaucratic confusion? At the time of writing, there is no definitive answer. But the episode itself is telling: even a hint of .su being shut down provoked a reaction out of all proportion to the number of domains in the zone.
The thing is, ICANN policy for “orphaned” country domains is not an automatic kill switch. The procedure involves notification, a transition period, consultations with stakeholders, technical preparation. We are talking years, not months. More than a hundred thousand domains means more than a hundred thousand owners, each with a website, email, linked services. Forced shutdown without migration cuts them all off at once.
As of September 2026, the requirements of Russian law No. 569-FZ came into force: owners of domains in the .su zone are required to undergo identification through the Gosuslugi (Unified Identification and Authentication System, ESIA) portal. A Soviet domain administered by a Russian organization is subject to Russian law—and now, to own an address in the zone of a country that no longer exists, you need a verified account on the portal of its successor state.
The irony is that a domain born in an era when the internet was the territory of enthusiasts and university networks has now been folded into a system of state control its creators could never have imagined. In 1990, Petri Ojala sent a request to delegate a zone—and could hardly have imagined that thirty-six years later, registering in that zone would require a verified account on an e-government portal.
Law 569-FZ applies to all domain zones administered under Russian jurisdiction—.ru, .рф and .su. For .su, this means an additional filter that will probably reduce the number of anonymous and fraudulent registrations, while at the same time potentially discouraging some foreign users who were drawn precisely by the ease of entry.
The .su domain has outlived the country that gave birth to it by more than three decades. It has survived the absence of ICANN, the creation of ICANN, several attempts to close it, changes of administrators, the cybercrime boom and state regulation. Its status is strange: legally, it is an artifact of a code deleted from ISO; in practice, it is functioning infrastructure and a reminder of a country that occupied one-sixth of the Earth’s landmass.
States disappear in days. The Belovezha Accords were signed on 8 December 1991, ratification took two weeks, and by 26 December it was all over. But a digital identifier cannot be lowered the way a flag is lowered: it is woven into an infrastructure on which living services depend. Each of the 112 thousand domains is somebody’s mailbox, somebody’s website, somebody’s habit of typing an address ending in .su.
Will .su be closed by 2030, as the confidential PTI document suggested? According to ICANN leadership, no formal deadlines exist. The retirement procedure, if it is ever launched, will take years. And for now, these two letters keep flashing in browser address bars around the world—a small, stubborn, functioning fragment of a country that has not been on the map since 1991, yet still receives mail.