.yu

~ the obit ~

My own country code has never been in question, which is why I never once thought about what it is or who decides it. Turkey got.tr, it has been administered out of a university in Ankara for most of my life, and there is no scenario in which it stops meaning what it means. That is the normal condition and it makes the abnormal case hard to see until you look at one.

The.yu domain was delegated on 15 June 1989. Borka Jerman Blazic registered it, and the official registrants were the University of Maribor and the Jozef Stefan Institute, both of them in Slovenia. It was the mechanism by which Yugoslavia got an internet connection at all. Two and a half years later there was no Yugoslavia in the sense the letters referred to, and the domain kept working.

What followed is one of the stranger administrative situations in the history of the root zone. Slovenia had its own code by then and had left the federation, but ARNES in Ljubljana went on operating.yu from 1992 to 1994, using it for email and little else. The successor republics took.si and.hr and.ba and.mk. The domain of the country they had left sat in the hands of the first one out the door.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who held the keys ~

Jon Postel settled it in 1994. Control moved to Belgrade, to the YUNET association at the University of Belgrade, on the reasoning that the entity still calling itself Yugoslavia had the better claim to the letters. This was IANA in the period when IANA was one man with a filing system and a reputation, deciding a question about a war zone from an office in California.

The state renamed itself Serbia and Montenegro in February 2003, and in July of that year ISO replaced the code YU with CS. A.cs domain was reserved and never used, which is its own small grave: a top level domain that existed on paper for three years and never had a single name under it. Then the union dissolved in June 2006 and even the paper code was wrong.

~ the letters and the country ~

The rule underneath all of this is that ICANN does not decide which country codes exist. ISO 3166 does, and ISO 3166 is a list maintained for postal and statistical purposes by people who are not thinking about hostnames. When a country stops being on that list, its domain is scheduled for removal, and no amount of traffic on it changes the outcome.

Serbia received.rs and Montenegro received.me in 2007. On 11 September that year the ICANN board resolved to retire.yu within two years, with RNIDS in Belgrade running it temporarily in the meantime. Registration for.rs opened at midday on 10 March 2008, and existing.yu holders had six months of priority to take the same name under the new code.

~ the day it expired ~

The original shutdown date was 30 September 2009. It was pushed back six months because the transition was not finished, which is what always happens when a deadline meets people who have letterheads printed. The final date held. At 12:00 CEST on 30 March 2010 the root zone change went through and.yu stopped resolving.

RNIDS put the number of still-active.yu sites at roughly four thousand. Every one of them broke at the same minute, and every inbound link to any of them broke with it. Two decades of a small country's web went from addressable to gone on a schedule set by a standards body that keeps a list of nations for other reasons entirely.

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