A top-level domain has been scrapped by ICANN because no one was using it. .um, which is the ccTLD for US "minor outlying islands", and the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California, who administrates the domain, saw little point in continuing to manage it.

The total number of TLDs is now 264, after the deletion of .um. Other domains for larger US territories still exist, such as .gu for Guam and .vi for the US Virgin Islands.

New Domain Names have cropped up frequently in recent years, including .mobi, .eu and .travel, whilst the disagreements about the .xxx domain for adult sites continues. Last month, ICANN also began to review public comments on how best to shorten the now somewhat overlarge list, revoking in particular those domains which were assigned to countries that no longer exist. .su, of the former Soviet Union, is the leading candidate for removal, but deleting it will be harder to deal with because there are still more than three million .su pages.

Scrapping .um had nothing to do with this new move by ICANN, however; ISI simply wished to stop administrating the domain. They had control of it because the staff of the University of Southern California were in charge of the Domain Name System in 1997 when the domain name was added. Control of the DNS went to ICANN in 1998, but responsibility for .um remained with ISI.