.ss will be top level domain of South Sudan

It is now official: .ss will become the future domain name extension of South Sudan. Almost instantly after South Sudan became an independent state, on July 9th 2010, they requested to be appointed their own proper country code top level domain. This has now been officially allocated to them.

The two-letter abbreviation already appears on the official ISO list of country codes. It’s not yet on the list of top level domains published by IANA, but should be soon.

The abbreviation “SS” was chosen by South Sudan officials themselves and appointed to them under the ISO 3166 standard. The South Sudan officials pointed out to be aware of “SS” being connected to nazi’s in Europe before they requested this as their new top level domain.

Since South Sudan is one of the poorest countries in the world, so actually developing their TLD might not be on the top of their to-do list. But politicly there is a big interest in this new TLD as there clearly is an aversion against using the Sudan TLD .sd within South Sudan.

Less then one year ago 3 other TLD’s where allocated when the Netherlands Antilles dissolved: .cw, .sx and .bq. But none of these TLDs are in active use yet as most don’t mind to still use the obsolete TLD .an