Have you ever wondered what happens to a country's stuff when it ceases to exist? Physical things
like buildings and weapons are easily transferable to other states or organisations. But what
about less tangible things? This video is all about domain names. And no it's not a
Squarespace sponsorship… unless they want it to be. Domain names are pretty important
and can be valued somewhere near the GDP of a small country.
To be able to understand this video (and yeah so it isn’t 30 seconds long) you need to
know a bit about URLs and a bit about the soviet union.
As you’ve made it onto the internet and to this video, you’ve probably got a decent
idea what a URL is. And you can probably see that it’s broken down into three pieces.
The parts are named the first, second and third level domains - but this way round to
make life annoying. The third level is almost always www. Which could stand for wicked wood
worm but it doesn’t. It stands for World Wide Web.
The second level domain name is often the fun one. It’s the one you can choose yourself,
as long as you have an idea so obscure or unwanted that no one has already got it. For
example you could have fishhurtmyfeelings, absolutelycheddar or even adamaucockisthebestyoutuber.
Ironically, both unwanteddomain and obscuredomain are not available.
This level of domain can even be written in emojis. As of 2018 there were at least 25,000
of these domains claimed. Including (poop emoji).la and (hot springs emoji).net which
serves as a kind of urban dictionary but for emojis. Predictably, the entries are not quite
PG. Some big companies have even given it a go. Coca Cola registered (smiley face emoji).ws
for a promotion, they also once bought all the ways of spelling ah from one ‘h’ up
to 63.
The first or top level domain (TLD) is the one we want to focus on. It’s most often
.com but can also be things like .gov or .mil for other types of website. There are also
another set called generic top level domains that are far from that with examples like
.barefoot .gripe .hiv .blockbuster and of course .meme
But the other large group of TLDs are country codes like .uk .us and .bs. There are 255
country code domains. Interestingly the united nations says there are only 193 countries.
(yes the vatican has its own domain) Some countries won the lottery with these allocations
because their governments sold the licencing rights and made a whole bunch of money off
popular domains. like google using .gl bitly using .ly and loads of people using .tv.
Now, onto the soviet union, it was a country famous for numerous things but basically,
all you need to know is that it was a country that used to look like this until it very
quickly looked like this. That’s because the soviet union ceased to exist in 1991 and
became all of these individual countries. But this is where it gets interesting.
Country specific TLDs took their codes from the ISO 3166. ISO confusingly stands for International
Organisation for Standardisation and this document assigns two letter codes for every
country. But they started doing this way back in 1974. The slightly sharper of you viewers
might have noticed that 1974 is actually before 1991 (woah). So this means that the soviet
union got a country code. Then when country codes were being given out at top level domains
the Soviet Union got its own. It was assigned to the country in September 1990. Just 15
months before the country collapsed. COINCIDENCE? Yeah, probably.
The country broke up and for about 2 years Russia, the biggest newly independent country,
didn’t have it’s own top level domain. They eventually got .ru in 1993 and it looked
like .su domain would fade into non-existence until it would finally be decommissioned.
But the Russian government requested to keep the domain and in 2001 opened registrations
for the domain name once again. There are reportedly around 118,335 sites still using
this domain name. Including institutions like the pro-Putin youth movement and the pro-Russian
insurgency in Ukraine. Due to the domains general lack of moderation it’s also reportedly
filled with nefarious sites and hackers.
Now, before you go running out to grab jujit.su or tirami.su (someone already has that one
actually, disappointingly, it redirects to another website with no mention of dessert)
there are some hurdles to getting this domain. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell you what
they were because the rules are all, unsurprisingly in Russian.
This is the part of the video where I would make a hamfisted segue like ‘You know where
you could learn to speak Russian, Skillshare, but more importantly Skillshare was built
using Squarespace, which you can only access with a password that you can keep safe with
Dashlane.’, that would be if this channel had any sponsors, which it doesn’t so this
is the end of the video.