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SAN JOSE, Calif. - Government investigators have filed a criminal complaint against the former chief financial officer of software maker Mercury Interactive accusing her of tax evasion in connection with a stock options backdating scheme.

The document filed this week in U.S. District Court by the Internal Revenue Service accuses Sharlene Abrams of concealing the amount of money she made from Mercury stock options and helping two former executives do the same on their tax returns.

The complaint asks government prosecutors to file criminal charges against Abrams on three counts of filing a false tax return for herself and aiding in false returns being filed for former Mercury Chief Executive Amnon Landan and former Chief Operating Officer Kenneth Klein.

As of Friday night an indictment had not been filed and a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco said no information about the case was available yet.

IRS spokeswoman Arlette Lee said the criminal tax-evasion case is the first of its kind in Northern California connected to stock options backdating.

Mercury was acquired by Hewlett-Packard Co. two years ago in a $4.9 billion deal designed to bolster the Palo Alto-based technology company’s blossoming software business. Mercury makes software that helps companies test the performance of their applications, such as payroll and sales software.

A message left for an HP spokeswoman after-hours Friday was not immediately returned. A home phone number for Abrams and the name of her defense lawyer could not immediately be located.

Backdating is the practice of changing a company’s stock options records to make it appear that those options were sold or granted on different dates than they actually were, usually to boost an employee’s windfall. It’s not illegal if it’s properly recorded in the company’s financial records.

Abrams is accused of tampering with Mercury’s records to make it appear that she, Landan and Klein cashed out of stock options at lower prices than they actually did in 2001, thus making it appear they earned less during that year and didn’t have to pay as much in taxes.

Abrams is already facing civil securities fraud charges along with Landan and two other former Mercury executives. Those charges were filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in May 2007.

The alleged options abuses happened before HP bought Mercury.

Mercury was one of the first companies to reveal its financial records were faulty because of stock options tampering.

The company agreed in October to pay $117.5 million to settle a group of lawsuits accusing the business software maker of duping investors.

Mercury also had to wipe out more than $530 million in previously reported profits and agreed to pay $28 million to settle civil fraud charges brought by the SEC.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A Michigan woman who advertised online for a hitman to kill her lover's wife pleaded guilty to the murder-for-hire scheme, prosecutors said on Friday.

Anne Marie Linscott, 49, faces 10 years in prison for each of three federal charges, including intent to commit murder, the U.S. Attorneys for the Western District of Michigan and the Eastern District of California said in a joint statement.

In November 2007, three California residents searching job listings on Craigslist.com found an advertisement for a “freelance” position posted by Linscott, according to court documents. The three job seekers contacted California police.

The defendant asked two of the respondents via e-mail to “eradicate” the victim and provided the victim's name, age and employment address. In one correspondence, she said she was looking for “silent assassins” and offered to pay $5,000 to kill the victim, who was not identified by the court.

“This IS a serious proposition,” Linscott said via e-mail. Her account name was “bourne2run.”

Linscott, a resident of Rockford, Michigan, met her lover while taking an online college course several years ago. Linscott and the man, identified in court documents only as Duane, carried on a sexual affair, meeting in Reno, Nevada, in 2005 and 2007. They spoke on the phone and corresponded by e-mail, filings said.

As part of a plea deal between the government and Linscott, prosecutors agreed to drop charges she had left an incendiary device outside her rival's house in April 2007.

Sentencing has yet to be scheduled.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard)

San Francisco - Now that Salesforce.com has proved that SaaS (software-as-a-service) is a successful business model, the company hopes to lead the way in cloud computing.

Many in the software industry consider cloud computing — offering a development infrastructure as a service — to be the next step in the move away from packaged software.

Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff stopped in New York this week to proselytize about why customers should use his company's Force.com platform, which offers application development in the cloud, over traditional application-development infrastructure.

Benioff is well-known for promoting his company's service-oriented strategy as the wave of the future, and he has positioned Force.com as the greatest thing to happen to application development since Visual Basic. However, given the emerging trend toward platform-as-a-service, Benioff and company appear to be on to something.

Salesforce.com's hosted development platform is gaining traction among companies that don't want to spend time and money investing in on-premise software infrastructure or for those that can't afford to because of budget constraints, said business customers who have used Force.com.

And as business customers become more comfortable with hosting and developing applications in the cloud, Force.com could displace traditional on-premise development infrastructure offered by the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM for some customers, especially those in the SMB market.

Platform-as-a-service got a big boost last week when

SEATTLE - Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle has arrived. Again.

Amazon’s $399 electronic book reader debuted in November but sold out almost immediately. Since then, Amazon has been bullish about customer demand but has declined to reveal how many back orders it has taken for the device.

Now, the Web retailer appears to have sorted out its supply chain and manufacturing holdups. Not only is the Kindle back in stock online, it was the sole subject of Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to shareholders.

In the letter, filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bezos trumpeted the Kindle’s advantage as a “purpose-built reading device,” as opposed to smart phones and laptops, which he said encourage “information snacking” and short attention spans.

“We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention,” he wrote.

Bezos also wrote that Amazon’s vision for the Kindle is that it will make “every book ever printed in any language all available in less than 60 seconds.”

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On the Net:

http://www.amazon.com/kindle

SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc.’s stock soared 20 percent Friday, restoring $28 billion in shareholder wealth as Wall Street renewed its love affair with the Internet search leader after weeks of worry about an online advertising slowdown.

Driven by stellar first-quarter results that surprised industry analysts, Google shares surged $89.87 to finish at $539.41. It marked the biggest one-day gain since Google’s initial public stock offering in August 2004, leaving the shares at their highest closing price since January.

Google had lost favor with investors as Web surfing data and the faltering U.S. economy raised concerns that people aren’t clicking as frequently on the Internet advertising links that generate most of the Mountain View-based company’s revenue.

The trend threatened to chip away at Google’s earnings because the company typically gets paid by the click.

Although there were signs of decelerated clicking in the United States, Google more than offset any negative effects by expanding its foreign business and tweaking its online ad system in a way that helped reap more revenue per click.

The first-quarter performance reinforced the belief that Google is a “must-own stock,” American Technology Research analyst Rob Sanderson wrote in a Friday note.

“While (economic) concerns won’t be completely dispelled, we believe the growth story remains intact and investors will again fall in love,” he wrote.

Dinosaur Securities analyst David Garrity also is convinced that the worst is over for Google’s stock, which was down 35 percent in 2008 before the first-quarter earnings changed investor sentiment.

“We think (Google’s stock) has seen its 2008 low. Onward and upward,” wrote Garrity, who expects the price to hit $750 during the next year.

Friday’s rally still left Google shares well below their peak of $747.24 reached less than six months ago. At that point, Google’s market value stood at $235 billion, about $66 billion, or nearly 40 percent higher, than at Friday’s close.

Whether Google’s stock can get back to where it once was will depend largely on how much more the company’s earnings and revenue growth tapers off. With the company’s annual revenue headed toward $20 billion, it’s becoming more difficult to produce the hefty gains that excite investors.

For instance, Google’s first-quarter revenue climbed 42 percent. That’s impressive, but well below the 63 percent growth in 2007’s first quarter.

Google’s profits could be squeezed later this year if it has to spend more money to upgrade the data centers that power its search engine and other online services like e-mail, said Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal. He said he thinks additional investments probably will be needed, given some of the data centers are three or four years old.

Microsoft Corp.’s bid to acquire Yahoo Inc. also could create a more formidable competitor to Google. Recognizing the threat, Google is trying to help Yahoo thwart Microsoft’s takeover bid by using its lucrative advertising system to place commercial links on Yahoo’s Web site. The potential partnership, in the midst of a test scheduled to be completed next week, would likely face intense antitrust scrutiny.

If nothing else, analysts believe Google wants to delay a combination between Microsoft and Yahoo for as long as possible to give it a better chance to widen its lead in the Internet search market, which currently generates the biggest chunk of online advertising.

Google ended the first quarter with a 60 percent share of the U.S. search market, up from 58 percent at the end of the fourth quarter, according to comScore Media Metrix. Yahoo was in second at a 21 percent share followed by Microsoft at 9 percent.

Despite the challenges ahead, Google still has ample opportunities to grow as advertisers shift more of their spending to the Internet from other media like newspapers, magazines, radio and television.

The Internet is expected to capture about 7 percent, or $44 billion, of the total worldwide advertising market this year. Analysts say the percentage of Internet advertising lags behind the amount of time consumers are spending online, suggesting that marketers will need to ramp up their spending even more if they want to reach potential customers.

Google also has been adding more advertising vehicles to supplement its search engine. Just last month, the company bought DoubleClick Inc. for $3.2 billion in an effort to sell more graphical advertising. And Google is starting to show more video advertising through its increasingly popular clip-sharing site, YouTube.com.

Finally, the first quarter represented a tipping point in Google’s maturation into an international company that’s becoming less vulnerable to the ups and downs of the U.S. economy. Google collected most of its first-quarter revenue outside the United States, the first time that has happened in the company’s 9 1/2-year history.

Besides diversifying its business, the higher international revenue should also help boost Google’s profit because it should keep company’s tax rate slightly lower than it has been in past years.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt left little doubt he expects the company to prosper as he hailed the first quarter results.

“It’s clear we are well positioned for 2008 and beyond, regardless of the business environment we are surrounded by,” Schmidt told analysts.

You can add Albany to your list of upcoming Microsoft products and services. On Friday, the software giant announced the launch of the new service as a private beta. The announcement confirmed months of rumors.

In an extension of its growing “software plus service” strategy, Microsoft said it is harnessing the Internet to keep productivity and security software up to date.

'All-in-One Subscription Service'

Albany is described by Microsoft as “a new all-in-one subscription service of essential software and services consumers told us were most important to them.” The essential products are productivity and security, Microsoft said, and subscribers will be able to install, with a few clicks, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live OneCare, Windows Live Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery.

The Office Live Workspace connector is also installed on the Office toolbar, allowing users to save documents on a dedicated online space for collaboration. Subscribers will be able to get the latest versions and the most recent security updates. Live OneCare includes firewall and antivirus protection.

Consumers have “expressed frustration at having to spend time and effort installing different types of software,” noted Group Product Manager Bryson Gordon in an interview on Microsoft's Web site, and they want a service for “keeping current on new versions and getting their computers set up.” An Albany subscription is good for up to three computers.

The Albany service does not replace the traditional distribution of software packages, Microsoft said. Rather, it addresses the needs of consumers who want the easiest possible way to receive the latest Microsoft Office and security updates. Such updates can be more troublesome for a consumer than a business with an IT department.

Cost a Mystery

Albany is an alternative way to get Office, not its next version. When the next version of Office is released, customers with an active Albany subscription will automatically receive it at no additional cost. Once a subscription is over, Gordon has said a user who chose not to renew would not lose documents or files.

The cost of the service is a mystery for now. Gordon said more information about pricing will be released later this year when Albany moves out of its private beta release.

There was also no mention of installation times or the availability of support.

The new service is yet another move by Microsoft to compete with Google Docs and other productivity suites being offered inexpensively or free to consumers on the Web.

The Federal Communications Commission's hearing at Stanford Thursday was a chance for the public to vent frustrations at Comcast's and other Internet service providers' network-management practices, but — unlike at a similar hearing in February — the ISPs were not around to listen.

FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin explained that the commission several weeks ago invited Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner and Cable Labs, but they all declined to attend. Martin reached out again to Comcast last week after it announced plans for a P2P “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.”

In the absence of the ISPs, the commissioners more clearly outlined their thinking on Net neutrality, even as some speakers blamed the FCC for creating the problem.

Need for Clear Rules

“We are here facing these problems because of a failure of FCC policy,” said Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig. “The FCC has failed to make it absolutely clear that network owners, if they're building the Internet, have to make it absolutely open.”

Martin hinted the FCC might fashion an order to regulate if and how ISPs can throttle Internet traffic. He said ISPs must adequately disclose their practices and should not discriminate on an application or protocol basis.

“There must be adequate disclosure by the network operators of the particular traffic-management tools being used,” Martin said, “not only to consumers,” but “to the designers of various applications and to entrepreneurs.”

Action Likely

He also warned against “arbitrary blocking or degrading of a particular application.” Martin said, “As we move into an era in which network operators are taking particular actions against individual applications or content, we need to evaluate those under stricter sets of scrutiny to make sure that whatever actions they're taking are actually furthering a legitimate purpose, and that their actions are narrowly tailored to serving that legitimate purpose.”

It's likely that the FCC will take action, said Craig Aaron, spokesperson for Free Press, a pro-Net neutrality advocacy group, in a telephone interview Friday. “Based on all of (Martin's) public statements, it seems he's taking Comcast's violation very seriously. I do expect to see the FCC take action soon, and I think they have to,” Aaron said.

Martin may not go as far as the Democratic commissioners would like, however. Commissioner Michael Copps called for the FCC to embrace a firm policy against ISPs discriminating against certain kinds of traffic.

A Policy Statement Update

“Now is the time for the FCC to add an enforceable principle of nondiscrimination to our Internet Policy Statement — a clear, strong declaration that we will not tolerate unreasonable discrimination by network operators and that we have in place enforcement policies to make sure that anyone with other ideas isn't going to get away with them,” Copps said in his opening statement.

“And, by the way, this policy should apply to wireless as well as wireline operators,” he added.

The other Democratic commissioner, Jonathan Adelstein, criticized the FCC's recent auction of the 700-MHz spectrum, saying the process “largely dashed hopes of a nationwide third channel into the home and solidified the hold of the largest incumbents. For many consumers, there is no meaningful choice of providers.”

Republicans Urge Market Approach

Adelstein also called on the commission to adopt an anti-discrimination leg to its policy statement. “We also need a strong commitment to monitoring and enforcing compliance on a case-by-case basis. These would be significant steps toward reaching the full promise of the Internet,” he said.

Republican commissioner Robert McDowell said the market is dealing with any problems, pointing to Comcast's recent agreement with BitTorrent and the ongoing work of the P4P research group to reduce the number of hops that files take as they move from peer to peer.

Deborah Taylor Tate, a Republican, agreed with McDowell. “Technology and the marketplace seem to be responding to appropriate oversight mechanisms,” she said.

TOKYO - The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $15 billion by many estimates, got a good deal on going global.

Its users around the world are translating Facebook’s visible framework into nearly two dozen languages — for free — aiding the company’s aggressive expansion to better serve the 60 percent of its 69 million users who live outside the United States.

The company says it’s using the wisdom of crowds to produce versions of site guidelines — especially terms specific to Facebook — that are in tune with local cultures.

“We thought it’d be cool,” said Javier Olivan, international manager at Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif. “Our goal would be to hopefully have one day everybody on the planet on Facebook.”

Coolness aside, and many users are embracing the idea, other social networks aren’t “crowdsourcing” translation. The move is generating mounting criticism online, where some users question whether amateurs can produce good translations. Critics complain of sloppiness and skimping, even as Facebook says it is improving service in an innovative way.

The concept of collaborative translation is familiar in open-source programming communities. But Facebook’s effort — as it builds sites in Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish and Dutch to join versions in Spanish, French and German that launched this year — is among the highest-profile attempts to harness users’ energy to do work traditionally handled by professionals.

The Spanish-language version has taken a particular beating for grammatical, spelling and usage problems throughout.

Ana B. Torres, a 25-year-old professional translator in Madrid, Spain, called the translation “extremely poor,” citing “outrageous spelling mistakes” such as “ase” instead of “hace” (for “makes” or “does”) and usage of the word “lenguaje” for “language” rather than the correct “idioma.”

Other critics say Facebook just wants free labor.

Valentin Macias, 29, a Californian who teaches English in Seoul, South Korea, has volunteered in the past to translate for the nonprofit Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia but said he won’t do it for Facebook.

“(Wikipedia is) an altruistic, charitable, information-sharing, donation-supported cause,” Macias told The Associated Press in a Facebook message. “Facebook is not. Therefore, people should not be tricked into donating their time and energy to a multimillion-dollar company so that the company can make millions more — at least not without some type of compensation.”

Facebook points out that it has spent considerable resources building the translation program. Olivan said it’s not soaking users but including them in the growth of the network — and possibly attracting new ones.

“If the goal is to save money, we’re doing the wrong thing, because we are basically spending our most valuable asset, which is engineering time,” he said.

He said that Facebook relishes being different from competitors and that users are helping the company produce versions in numerous languages as quickly as possible.

Just one-fifth of the world’s Internet population actively manages profiles on a social network, said David Jones, vice president of global marketing for Friendster Inc., which has recently shifted its focus to capitalize on its strength in Southeast Asia.

“It’s still a bit of a land grab,” he said. “So there’s plenty of growth to be had in the world, and we’re focused on that, and certainly other social networks I’m sure are as well.”

Friendster recently launched a beta version in Vietnamese, adding to its lineup of versions in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian. It plans to keep introducing a new language every month or two.

Setting the pace, however, is industry leader MySpace. The News Corp. subsidiary has 200 million registered users worldwide and 29 country-specific and regional sites and more on the way.

Its global push, which began in early 2006, appears to be paying off. Between June 2006 and June 2007, its number visitors worldwide age 15 and older jumped 72 percent to 114.1 million, according to Internet research firm comScore Inc.

In the same period, however, Facebook’s global traffic surged 270 percent to 52.2 million users, according to comScore — even though it had yet to launch its first foreign-language site.

As it enters each market, MySpace hires a dedicated team, said Travis Katz, international managing director. Contractors perform the initial translation, which the local MySpace team tweaks to ensure it fits the market, he said.

“The translation in and of itself is not very expensive,” Katz said. “The thing that’s challenging is getting the cultural aspects right and making sure that the site is culturally relevant and doesn’t feel like an invader from Silicon Valley landed.”

Friendster’s Jones said his company also uses third-party translators.

“As interesting as it might be to get your users to chip in and help out on that, we could do it faster ourselves and very consistently, quite frankly, across the language, across the entire site,” Jones said.

More than 100,000 users have installed Facebook’s translation application. Nearly 10,000 helped translate the French, Spanish and German sites — the Spanish version in less than four weeks and the German one in two weeks.

The process involves translating a glossary of basic Facebook terms, translating text strings throughout the site, voting on each translation and then “testing and verification.”

Some users, like Murat Odabasi of London, are spending hours each day translating Facebook. Responsible for 14,910 winning words and 1,938 winning phrases, Odabasi held the No. 2 spot among 391 translators on the Turkish leaderboard as of Wednesday.

Odabasi, 24, a software developer and native Turkish speaker, said the volunteer arrangement is good for users as well as Facebook.

“We come up with the words and phrases that will … eventually become a part of the Turkish language itself,” he said in an e-mail in English. “It feels good to be creating something that will in time be seen and used by millions of people.”

Collaborative translation is an increasingly important tool for businesses, said Renato Beninatto with the Massachusetts consulting firm Common Sense Advisory. But he said companies may need professional services to finalize translations.

“The traditional wisdom is that if you have fewer translators, you generate a better product,” said Beninatto, also a spokesman for the Globalization & Localization Association.

If managed well, however, crowdsourcing can result in a good translation, he said.

Among the hottest debates so far has been over “poke” — Facebook’s term for giving someone a playful nudge. In Spanish, it became “dar un toque.” In French, “faire un signe.” And in German, “anstupsen.”

Japanese translators couldn’t find an equivalent so they decided to go with the original English.

Argentina’s Web sites end in “.ar,” while Germany gets “.de” — for Deutschland, as the country is known in German.

Then there’s “.aq” for Antarctica, a land with more penguins than computers.

About 250 country-code domain names exist for various nations or territories around the world, used as suffixes in the Internet addresses crucial for computers to find Web sites and route e-mail. Outside the United States, these suffixes are often preferred over the global “.com” as a source of national pride.

But deciding who gets to have one — or keep one — can be tricky.

The Internet’s key oversight agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, allocates domains based on standards set by the International Organization for Standardization, which in turn takes information from the United Nations.

That’s how the Palestinian territories got “.ps” in 2000. That’s why East Germany’s “.dd” disappeared after reunification with its western neighbor in 1990.

But change doesn’t always come easily, as ICANN officials are finding with their efforts to dissolve the Soviet Union’s “.su” domain, 16 years after the communist regime’s collapse. Many Internet users and entrepreneurs have resisted the transition to domains assigned to individual republics, such as “.ru” for Russia.

The phase-out of Yugoslavia’s “.yu” is only now beginning, five years after the country dissolved following civil war.

The federation of Serbia and Montenegro, formed from the remnants of Yugoslavia in 2003, had been given “.cs,” which once belonged to Czechoslovakia. But before anyone could use it, the country further split into Serbia and Montenegro.

It’ll take at least another year and a half for “.yu” users to fully transition to “.rs” for Serbia and “.me” for Montenegro, both of which were officially added in September, along with “.kp” for North Korea. Until at least Sept. 30, 2009, “.yu” sites will still work, and owners get priority registering the “.rs” or “.me” counterparts.

Likewise, “.tl” is still transitioning from “.tp” following East Timor’s independence, with no new “.tp” names accepted as of 2004.

Meanwhile, “.eh” for the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara was set aside long ago, but it remains offline because two opposing groups couldn’t agree on who to run it.

Others, like “.sj” for the Arctic territories of Svalbard and Jan Mayen, remain unused because of national policy — their Norwegian administrators want residents to use Norway’s “.no” domain.

And “.um” got a new life only after ICANN approved its termination. Assigned for U.S. “minor outlying islands” such as the Midway Islands, “.um” wasn’t being used, and its caretakers no longer wanted to bother running it. But entrepreneurs have since spun it off and are now selling names — so far, mostly as landing pages to generate advertising. ICANN still plans to delete the domain, saying the new operators are unauthorized.

Occasionally, ICANN must bend the rules and stray from the standards group.

The European Union was given “.eu” in 2005 after ICANN decided to allow codes on a separate reserved list kept by the standards body. And though the United Kingdom is officially assigned “.gb,” the use of “.uk” is entrenched in British society.

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On the Net:

Country-code list: http://www.iana.com/domains/root/db

ISO list: http://tinyurl.com/53vnq8

MOSCOW - The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there’s one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace.

Sixteen years after the superpower’s collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet “.su” domain name have been rising — registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts to extinguish the online Soviet outpost.

Russian nostalgia for the Soviet empire is part of the story. Nashi, or “Ours,” is a pro-Kremlin youth group that gained notoriety for raucous protests against Kremlin critics. The group loyally praises President Vladimir Putin at “nashi.su,” though it denies its choice of the “.su” domain was meant to send a political message.

Many Web entrepreneurs also see potential profits in the domain, grabbing instantly recognizable names already claimed in other, better known domains.

A small Moscow car repair shop that specializes in Ford vehicles boasts a home page at “ford.su,” while the owner of “apple.su” is a Muscovite who said he is ready to swap it for a new laptop computer — and not necessarily a Mac from Apple Inc.

Vladimir Khramov, a network administrator from Moscow, said he bought “microsoft.su” last year simply to acquire an easy-to-remember ending for his e-mail address.

While Khramov insists he “did not buy it for reselling,” others are out to make a quick ruble. Yan Balayan registered a number of high-profile addresses, including “ussr.su,” “stalin.su” and “kgb.su” — he’s asking for $30,000 each, but stands ready to haggle.

With few exceptions — namely, the tech-savvy Baltic state of Estonia — Internet penetration is relatively low in the former Soviet republics. Russia’s Public Opinion Foundation says that only 27 percent of Russian adults use the Internet — and only about 12 percent of the adults on any given day.

Yet many Internet entrepreneurs are passionate about the “.su” domain, even as others are scornful of it as a relic of the past, saying it doesn’t deserve the same status as “.ru” for Russia, “.uk” for the United Kingdom or “.fr” for France.

“They are selling tickets to a drowning ship,” said Anton Nosik, a veteran Web journalist and founder of several successful online projects. “Their message is to losers and latecomers.”

What’s next? Domain names for the Roman Empire or Ancient Greece?

Country-code domains, derived from a list kept by the International Organization for Standardization, typically disappear when a country ceases to exist or changes its name. Both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia lost their domain names after they broke up into smaller nations. So did Zaire after it became the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Internet’s key oversight agency, the Marina del Rey, Calif.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and its predecessors have made several efforts since the 1990s to eliminate the “.su” address.

All have failed.

In late 2006, ICANN even sought advice from the community on how best to revoke outdated suffixes. Yet the resistance continued, and the phase-out seems to be in a stalemate. The domain continues to work normally, but listed in records as “being phased out.”

“There are no technical issues,” said John Crain, ICANN’s chief technical officer. “It all comes down to politics.”

The “.su” domain dates back to September 1990, a little more than a year before the Soviet collapse. Russia was given the “.ru” domain name in 1994. Other former Soviet republics were also assigned codes.

But the owners of “.su” sites stubbornly resisted switching on commercial, political and patriotic grounds. Some even accused the White House of scheming to eliminate the last remnants of its Cold War rival.

As a compromise, the Russian organization responsible for registering new domain names under “.su” agreed to stop issuing new ones, while existing “.su” addresses were allowed to continue for the time being.

A loophole allowed existing “.su” addresses like “lenin.su” to assign subdomains such as “vladimir.lenin.su.” As a result, the online population at “.su” kept growing throughout the 1990s — although not nearly as fast as “.ru.”

Then, in 2001, in response to pressure from users eager for freer access, registration in “.su” was opened to everyone everywhere.

The price was kept artificially high — $120 per name, six times the price for “.ru” — to limit the number of new users and prevent entrepreneurs from grabbing names for resale in a practice called cybersquatting, said Andrey Vorobyev, spokesman for RU-Center, the body authorized to register domain names.

But in January, RU-Center dropped the price for “.su” to $25 in a bid to boost the domain’s worldwide popularity.

The attractive new price sparked a registration rush that bumped up the number of “.su” sites to 45,000 today, more than quadruple the 11,000 registered as of late 2006. The demand shows no signs of relenting — the jump from 31,000 in January represents a 45 percent rise.

But by domain name standards, the number of “.su” registrations is still very small. Russia’s “.ru,” for instance, has more than 1 million names. Germany’s “.de” has 12 million, and the global “.com” has about 75 million.

Champions of the online Soviet domain say there is still plenty of room for growth.

Some envisage the “.su” domain as a virtual venue for those who fondly recall the old Soviet Union as a place where Russian, the lingua franca of the Soviet empire, knit together a host of Asian and European ethnic groups and cultures.

And by late April, the “.su” domain plans to start allowing names in Russian; currently such names are limited to English letters, numerals and the hyphen.

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Associated Press Writer David Nowak in Moscow contributed to this story.