South Sudan top-level domain is .ss

Tue, 09/13/2011 - 11:20 — Alexis Wilke

Very recently, Sudan was split in the northern and southern part. The southern part has a new name: South Sudan. It is now official and the new ISO country code given to this new country is SS.

This means their country top-level domain name will be .ss.

Assuming they open their domain name to all world wide, this is going to be quite interesting! There are many words in the English language that end with .ss such as dre.ss, and stre.ss, and le.ss...

If you're in the domain name business, look out for those! If it works like other top-level domains, these will go really quick and make the South Sudan domain name business explode.

Alexis Wilke's blog

Comments

Fri, 10/07/2011 - 12:45 — Anonymous (not verified)

Dot SF

How about Somaliland? I thought they were using .ss? The only other two combinations remaining under S are: SF and SW. But I think Swaziland uses the SW, so the only remaining is SF, which Finlanbd sometimes use, but theirs now is FI.

Fri, 10/07/2011 - 13:19 — Alexis Wilke

Top level domain names

The top level domain name for a country is defined using their 2 letters ISO code. In other words, it is not assigned randomly as one could think it is. There are a few exceptions such as .uk which is wrong. It should be .gb which is not currently used (but marked as reserved to avoid anyone else from using it.)

The .sl domain name is for Serria Leone which offers 5 second level domain names too such as .gov.sl and .com.sl.

The only country that controls other top level domain names is the US with names such as .name, .museum, .info, .mobi, .tel, etc.

The .com, .org, .edu are now pretty well recognized as international, although most people still view it as American (which it kind of is anyway.)

As for .sf, it was never used for Finland. They had the .fi top level domain name since 1986. However, it was not used very much because they decided to make it very difficult to obtain a .fi domain name (still today.) On the other hand, they have a .ax for one group of islands (Åland Islands). Probably because the islands are considered autonomous enough to have had their own top level domain.