theregister.co.uk
The internet will make space for South Sudan this month, with plans to create a new top-level domain for the world's newest nation.
There's only one catch: the new country-code TLD is .ss, which is formally listed as a hate symbol thanks to its use by the Nazi party's Schutzstaffel (or SS) in the 1920s through to the 1940s.
The SS maintained the police state of Nazi Germany and was responsible, among other things, for the genocidal killing of six million Jews in the Holocaust and millions of socialists, homosexuals, Roma, Russians, and anyone else Hitler's regime took a dislike to. Its leaders were found guilty of war crimes as well as crimes against humanity, and many were hanged in the aftermath of the Second World War.
As such the "SS" symbol is a powerful reminder of the very worst atrocities carried out by the Nazis, and, unfortunately, maintains current relevance thanks to having been adopted by white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
On the flipside, South Sudan was formed in 2011 when it broke away from Sudan following an independence vote that was supported by nearly 99 per cent of the affected populace.
As part of the process of becoming a new nation, ministers started asking the relevant international organizations for their own identifier: including its own international telephone extension (+211) and two-letter country abbreviation.
The new government formally asked the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to give it the .ss two-letter abbreviation, saying at the time that it had been told that there was an association with the Nazis in Europe but had applied for it anyway. Presumably as an African nation, they weren't all that bothered by a 70-year-old European problem.
But despite being formally given the .ss identifier by the ISO back in August 2011, nearly eight years later it has still not been added to the internet. That may be about to change however with the board of the body in charge of the internet's domain name system, US-based ICANN, including "Delegation of the .SS (South Sudan) country-code top-level domain" on its agenda for a meeting on January 27.