On September 19, 1990, 34 years ago, the domain for use within the USSR – SU was registered on the World Wide Web. The SU domain is the national top-level domain for the USSR. It is still in use today, even though the Soviet Union no longer exists.
The country’s first network project was created at the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, bringing together physicists and programmers. On August 28, 1990, the first telecommunication session with Finland was held via international telephone – the network that would later be called “RELCOM” connected to the global Internet for the first time.
On September 19, 1990, the Soviet UNIX User’s Group (SUUG) registered the top-level domain SU for use in the USSR. The group also performed the domain’s administrative functions. The first Russian website was the resource of the Mathematics Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, ipsun.ac.msc.su (today – www.ras.ru).
After the dissolution of the USSR, the former Soviet republics, now independent, received their own domains. For Russia, the International Network Information Center “InterNIC” registered the national domain RU in 1994.
The SU zone was frozen and remained in this state until 2002, when it was reopened for the priority registration of new names – only trademark owners could register at first.
In 2003, the Internet Development Fund, which acted as the SU domain administrator until 2020, announced the completion of the priority registration period, and on June 27 of that year, open registration of second-level domains in the SU zone began.
On September 19, 2007, an “Agreement on the Support and Development of the SU Domain on the Internet” was signed between RosNIIRos and the Internet Development Fund, aiming to create optimal conditions for the functioning and further development of the SU domain.
In 2020, the rights to the SU domain zone were transferred from the Internet Development Fund to RosNIIRos.