Not all ccTLD domains get to shine; some faded into obscurity before anyone ever knew. One such example is .dd, the short-lived digital space for East Germany, formally known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Back in the Cold War days, when the world was split between East and West, the GDR was assigned its own country code TLD. Why double D’s, you may ask: The letters “DD” came from Deutsche Demokratische Republik. On paper, that meant East Germany had a domain flag of its own but in practice .dd never left the station.
Unlike its Western sibling .de which grew into one of the world’s most popular ccTLDs, .dd never made it into the global root servers. The only place it saw action was inside an academic bubble; a small internal network between the universities of Jena and Dresden. If you wanted to send an email across the Iron Curtain, .dd wasn’t going to help you.
Then the Reunification of Germany happened!
When the Berlin Wall crumbled and the GDR dissolved into history, .dd stood no chance. By 1990, East Germany merged into the Federal Republic, which already had .de firmly established. There was no need for a redundant domain and ISO withdrew the DD country code. Just like that, .dd was gone before it ever really lived.
What makes .dd even more interesting is the contrast with the Soviet Union’s .su ccTLD.
Despite the USSR disappearing in 1991, .su still lingers on today, a strange reminder of a vanished superpower; .dd never got that kind of nostalgic afterlife. There are no startups, no retro websites, no die-hard fans keeping it alive. It’s one of the internet’s forgotten ccTLDs, a domain that history erased before the web itself took off!
In memoriam, here’s the old East Germany anthem that’s as dead as .dd itself.
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