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The ICANN policy of removing TLDs just because a country no longer exists makes no practical sense and only serves to break the internet.

Scoundreller 7mo ago
Now I want to try writing letters and see if they still get delivered if I write down the predecessor country.
- sznio 7mo ago
  Considering how my parents still refer to that area of the world as Yugoslavia, I'm pretty sure the postal system will know how to route it. Will probably be escalated to a human for labeling though.
- otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
  There's hundreds of thousands of websites with the .su domain. (The USSR dissolved before the world-wide-web was even a thing.) If Barclays can get their own vanity TLD then Yugoslavia should be able too.
  - martheen 7mo ago
    Granted, ccTLDs has been already going on for years before USSR change their pronoun to were. Mostly for email, no idea if ccTLDs found their use on BBS. I can understand .su continuing because Russia pretty much took over everything that represent Soviet Union elsewhere (embassies, Security Council seat, etc) and other former Soviet states either support the continuation or indifferent. Yugoslavia continuation is more contentious topic.
    - vasac 7mo ago
      Russia pretty much took over all the USSR's external debts too.
  - emmelaich 7mo ago
    Maybe introduce .bk (Balkans) then anyone around there can use it.
    - sensanaty 7mo ago
      I'm sure there will be no way for us to kill eachother over something like this, no sirree...
    - throw-the-towel 7mo ago
      .bk is not allowed because two-letter TLDs are reserved for entities with an ISO 3166 country code. .balkan might appear one day.
- input_sh 7mo ago
  Some of the modern-day countries retained their five-digit postcodes from Yugoslav times (Serbia and Bosnia for sure, maybe a few more, I'm too lazy to check), some only got rid of the first digit which used to identify individual Yugoslav republics (AKA modern-day countries). So I'd say it's highly likely they'd be delivered, as it's still mostly the same, though I should point out many cities changed names since. For like the most basic example, Montenegro's capital was called Titograd between WW2 and 1992, before it swapped back to being called Podgorica.
  - Gare 7mo ago
    In Croatia only Zagreb got changed to 10 000 (because capital), the rest stayed the same.
- sensanaty 7mo ago
  I've encountered a surprising number of forms where "Serbia" isn't an option, but Yugoslavia is, even in 2026. There's been a number of times here in the Netherlands where I had to pick Yugoslavia as my place of birth on official government forms because we were technically still Yugoslavia in '98 and not Serbia and Montenegro. I have no doubts that snail mail addressed to Yugoslavia still exists and probably gets routed just fine
  - hugh-avherald 7mo ago
    It would be logical if your date of birth changed the available options for country of birth to the set of countries that were contemporaneously recognized.
    - sensanaty 7mo ago
      Sure, but my Serbian passport actually says "Place of birth: Republika Srbije" (Republic of Serbia) :p
- winstonwinston 7mo ago
  It will work, they'll figure it out based on postcode and city name. I get items delivered to me, to this day, because at the time of account registration the address form had only Yugoslavia.
onion2k 7mo ago
Yugoslavia broke into several smaller countries following the death of the Yugoslavian dictator, and a huge war ensued. Maintaining the domain records was probably quite a low priority.
- charcircuit 7mo ago
  The organization that ran the nameservers for .yu still exists today. Even in the case where there was no one fit to run them, all the records could be transferred to ICANN or someone else to run the server.
- input_sh 7mo ago
  .yu was purchasable long after the country ceased to exist, until 2008 to be exact. Technically speaking, "Yugoslavia" continued to exist until 2003, when the name finally got deprecated in favour of "Serbia & Montenegro" as one country (also including the territory of Kosovo), which itself only lasted 3 years before Montenegro declared independence (and Kosovo did the same 2 years after). So however you spin it, the domain outlived the country by at least 5 years, arguably 15(ish), 9 of which were post-war(s).
- bojan 7mo ago
  You got the timeline wrong. The break-up of Yugoslavia was a long, arguably still on-going, process, the final phase of which happened peacefully. Serbia and Montenegro, that made the post-1992 Yugoslavia, agreed in 2003 to change the name of the country to Serbia and Montenegro, pending the Montenegrin independence referendum scheduled for 2006. Considering the possibility of another country name depreciation in three years, they agreed to keep the yu domain. Fun fact, had the Montenegrin referendum gone the other way, the plan was to use .cs as the national domain, which used to be owned by another ex-country, Czechoslovakia.
  - SahAssar 7mo ago
    > The break-up of Yugoslavia was a long, arguably still on-going, process, the final phase of which happened peacefully. I get that I'm saying this as a outsider, but isn't that a very mild way to describe a civil war and a genocide?
kome 7mo ago
fully agree. also Yugoslavia lives on, in our heart :,)
- vrganj 7mo ago
  Bratstvo i jedinstvo, druže.
  - foobarian 7mo ago
    Mi smo Titovi, Tito je naš!
- UncleSlacky 7mo ago
  Sadly even Cyber Yugoslavia is no more, it only shows the text "juga.com" now: https://web.archive.org/web/20220122221632/http://www.juga.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220122221632/http://www.juga.c... http://www.juga.com/ http://www.juga.com/
- grujicd 7mo ago
  Core of Yugoslavia, still lives on in cultural space, where music, movies, and literature are consumed in all ex republics. Except probably Kosovo, which was not part of serbo-croatian linguistic space. But even in Slovenia and Macedonia there's a significant part of population which at least understands common language. And it's not only about language, there's lot of shared mentality and history from Yugoslav period.
  - foobarian 7mo ago
    Kusturica's movie "Underground" captures the Yugoslav vibe quite vividly, highly recommend
  - 1-more 7mo ago
    > Except probably Kosovo, which was not part of serbo-croatian linguistic space. The Albanian speaking countries really punch above their weight for English language pop stars with global presence. ~7.5 Million Albanian speakers globally gave us Bebe Rexha, Dua Lipa, Ava Max, and Rita Ora. 22 Million Romanian speakers for a comparable post-Communist community and I don't think I know any pop stars with that background off the top of my head.

Scoundreller 7mo ago

Now I want to try writing letters and see if they still get delivered if I write down the predecessor country.

sznio 7mo ago
Considering how my parents still refer to that area of the world as Yugoslavia, I'm pretty sure the postal system will know how to route it. Will probably be escalated to a human for labeling though.
otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
There's hundreds of thousands of websites with the .su domain. (The USSR dissolved before the world-wide-web was even a thing.) If Barclays can get their own vanity TLD then Yugoslavia should be able too.
- martheen 7mo ago
  Granted, ccTLDs has been already going on for years before USSR change their pronoun to were. Mostly for email, no idea if ccTLDs found their use on BBS. I can understand .su continuing because Russia pretty much took over everything that represent Soviet Union elsewhere (embassies, Security Council seat, etc) and other former Soviet states either support the continuation or indifferent. Yugoslavia continuation is more contentious topic.
  - vasac 7mo ago
    Russia pretty much took over all the USSR's external debts too.
- emmelaich 7mo ago
  Maybe introduce .bk (Balkans) then anyone around there can use it.
  - sensanaty 7mo ago
    I'm sure there will be no way for us to kill eachother over something like this, no sirree...
  - throw-the-towel 7mo ago
    .bk is not allowed because two-letter TLDs are reserved for entities with an ISO 3166 country code. .balkan might appear one day.
input_sh 7mo ago
Some of the modern-day countries retained their five-digit postcodes from Yugoslav times (Serbia and Bosnia for sure, maybe a few more, I'm too lazy to check), some only got rid of the first digit which used to identify individual Yugoslav republics (AKA modern-day countries). So I'd say it's highly likely they'd be delivered, as it's still mostly the same, though I should point out many cities changed names since. For like the most basic example, Montenegro's capital was called Titograd between WW2 and 1992, before it swapped back to being called Podgorica.
- Gare 7mo ago
  In Croatia only Zagreb got changed to 10 000 (because capital), the rest stayed the same.
sensanaty 7mo ago
I've encountered a surprising number of forms where "Serbia" isn't an option, but Yugoslavia is, even in 2026. There's been a number of times here in the Netherlands where I had to pick Yugoslavia as my place of birth on official government forms because we were technically still Yugoslavia in '98 and not Serbia and Montenegro. I have no doubts that snail mail addressed to Yugoslavia still exists and probably gets routed just fine
- hugh-avherald 7mo ago
  It would be logical if your date of birth changed the available options for country of birth to the set of countries that were contemporaneously recognized.
  - sensanaty 7mo ago
    Sure, but my Serbian passport actually says "Place of birth: Republika Srbije" (Republic of Serbia) :p
winstonwinston 7mo ago
It will work, they'll figure it out based on postcode and city name. I get items delivered to me, to this day, because at the time of account registration the address form had only Yugoslavia.

onion2k 7mo ago

Yugoslavia broke into several smaller countries following the death of the Yugoslavian dictator, and a huge war ensued. Maintaining the domain records was probably quite a low priority.

charcircuit 7mo ago
The organization that ran the nameservers for .yu still exists today. Even in the case where there was no one fit to run them, all the records could be transferred to ICANN or someone else to run the server.
input_sh 7mo ago
.yu was purchasable long after the country ceased to exist, until 2008 to be exact. Technically speaking, "Yugoslavia" continued to exist until 2003, when the name finally got deprecated in favour of "Serbia & Montenegro" as one country (also including the territory of Kosovo), which itself only lasted 3 years before Montenegro declared independence (and Kosovo did the same 2 years after). So however you spin it, the domain outlived the country by at least 5 years, arguably 15(ish), 9 of which were post-war(s).
bojan 7mo ago
You got the timeline wrong. The break-up of Yugoslavia was a long, arguably still on-going, process, the final phase of which happened peacefully. Serbia and Montenegro, that made the post-1992 Yugoslavia, agreed in 2003 to change the name of the country to Serbia and Montenegro, pending the Montenegrin independence referendum scheduled for 2006. Considering the possibility of another country name depreciation in three years, they agreed to keep the yu domain. Fun fact, had the Montenegrin referendum gone the other way, the plan was to use .cs as the national domain, which used to be owned by another ex-country, Czechoslovakia.
- SahAssar 7mo ago
  > The break-up of Yugoslavia was a long, arguably still on-going, process, the final phase of which happened peacefully. I get that I'm saying this as a outsider, but isn't that a very mild way to describe a civil war and a genocide?

kome 7mo ago

fully agree. also Yugoslavia lives on, in our heart :,)

vrganj 7mo ago
Bratstvo i jedinstvo, druže.
- foobarian 7mo ago
  Mi smo Titovi, Tito je naš!
UncleSlacky 7mo ago
Sadly even Cyber Yugoslavia is no more, it only shows the text "juga.com" now: https://web.archive.org/web/20220122221632/http://www.juga.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220122221632/http://www.juga.c... http://www.juga.com/ http://www.juga.com/
grujicd 7mo ago
Core of Yugoslavia, still lives on in cultural space, where music, movies, and literature are consumed in all ex republics. Except probably Kosovo, which was not part of serbo-croatian linguistic space. But even in Slovenia and Macedonia there's a significant part of population which at least understands common language. And it's not only about language, there's lot of shared mentality and history from Yugoslav period.
- foobarian 7mo ago
  Kusturica's movie "Underground" captures the Yugoslav vibe quite vividly, highly recommend
- 1-more 7mo ago
  > Except probably Kosovo, which was not part of serbo-croatian linguistic space. The Albanian speaking countries really punch above their weight for English language pop stars with global presence. ~7.5 Million Albanian speakers globally gave us Bebe Rexha, Dua Lipa, Ava Max, and Rita Ora. 22 Million Romanian speakers for a comparable post-Communist community and I don't think I know any pop stars with that background off the top of my head.