Yugoslav top level domain goes black

On Wednesday, the .yu domain of the former Yugoslavia will disappear from the internet. All .yu websites that have not yet switched to a .rs or .me extension will soon become unavailable. It is estimated that there are still four thousand.

Already in 2006 it was announced that the Icann would be phasing out the .yu extension. Since 2007, owners of a .yu domain name could exchange it for a .rs or .me variant, the ccTLDs of Serbia and Montenegro respectively. The deadline for the removal has already been extended to give domain holders extra time to transfer their domains to a new extension. Yet it is estimated that there are still four thousand websites that have not made the transition.

The .yu address was reserved for the socialist republic of Yugoslavia in 1989, but that country fell apart in the early 1990s. When the two former republics of Serbia and Montenegro united in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, they wanted to use the .yu extension. Initially this was not successful, because the management of .yu was still at a Slovenian university. Slovenia, like other former Yugoslav republics, was not happy with the name of the united Serbia and Montenegro and refused to transfer the top-level domain. Ultimately, the Icann decided in 1994 that the domain should be transferred to the ‘new’ Yugoslavia.

Just under ten years later, the republic was transformed into a confederation called Serbia and Montenegro, after which the .cs domain was reserved. That domain was previously used by Czechoslovakia. The .cs domain was supposed to replace .yu, but that would never happen; everyone continued to use the Yugoslav extension. In 2006 the confederation was dissolved, and Serbia and Montenegro became independent. Serbia received the .rs domain and Montenegro .me. Because the Republic of Yugoslavia no longer existed, it was decided to abolish the extension.

The .yu extension isn’t the only ccTLD to go offline; the disappearance of the .su domain is also planned. That is the extension of the former Soviet Union. However, there are protests against the domain’s removal, and since early 2008, the number of registered .su domains has more than doubled to 82,000, making it the most widely used extension to date to disappear from the Internet. Another extension that will disappear is .tp, the former extension of East Timor. That country now has the .tl domain.

Incidentally, the Icann is setting up a system for registering TLDs themselves, so that companies can, for example, register their company name as an extension. However, the plans have been delayed, and there are certain conditions to the registration, in addition to a cost of $ 185,000. For example, a ‘custom’ tld should not cause confusion; so it could be that someone who wants to breathe new life into the .yu domain is not allowed to register this extension.