When the SFR Yugoslavia dissolved, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia registered their own ccTLDs (.si,.hr,.ba and.mk).Serbia andMontenegro formed theFederal Republic of Yugoslavia, but wasunder international sanctions at the time because of ongoingYugoslav wars. Between 1992 and 1994, the domain was run byARNES who only used it for email. ARNES rejected all requests by Serbian institutions for new domains, severely limiting the country’s access to the internet.[3] The domain became asuccession matter when the Slovenians refused to relinquish the domain name to theUniversity of Belgrade inSerbia, which had requested they do so.
Following the personal intervention of theInternet Assigned Numbers Authority founderJon Postel,[3] in 1994 IANA finally decreed that the domain should pass to FR Yugoslavia. After that, the domain was managed by the YUNET Association, an organization based in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at theUniversity of Belgrade.
The FR Yugoslavia renamed itselfSerbia and Montenegro in February 2003. The code YU was replaced by CS in July 2003 following the official name change, and the ccTLD.cs was reserved for Serbia and Montenegro after the name change. However, .cs was never actually used, and .yu remained one of the few ccTLDs thatdid not correspond to a currentISO 3166-1 two-letter code.
The state union of Serbia and Montenegro was dissolved in June 2006, and in September 2006, ISO accordingly proposed the replacement the codes RS for Serbia and ME for Montenegro. On 26 September 2006 the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency agreed on the change ofISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code CS to RS. The new domains.rs for Serbia and.me for Montenegro became active shortly thereafter.
In September 2007ICANN resolved that the .yu domain would be operated temporarily under theSerbian National Register of Internet Domain Names (RNIDS), operators of the new .rs domain registry.[4] A two-year transition period started, and the .yu domain was scheduled to expire on 30 September 2009.[5] However, the Serbian registrar requested an extension[6] and ICANN decided to extend the transition deadline another six months. Finally, the Serbian registrar declared the end of the .yu domain at 12:00 CEST on 30 March 2010.[1][7] All .yu websites that failed to transition were deleted, including historical ones.[8] RNIDS estimated there to have been around four thousand active websites using the .yu domain at the time of its deprecation.[9]
All of the domains directly under .yu were reserved forlegal entities only. Top level domain was reserved for federal institutions and official governmental institutions, as well asInternet service providers. TheSerbian Orthodox Church was also allowed to use .yu domain.
Academic organizations, such as universities, used the.ac.yu domain. For example, the School of Electrical Engineering (ETF) at the University of Belgrade (BG) had the etf.bg.ac.yu domain.
Educational institutions, such as primary and high schools, used the.edu.yu domain.
Independent organizations used the.org.yu domain.
Corporations used the.co.yu domain.
The Government used the.gov.yu domain.
Montenegrin websites often used the.cg.yu subdomain which was given for free to customers of a Montenegrin ISP which controlled the domain, which made it a popular option for those who opted not to purchase a domain for their website.
^Ben-David, Anat (1 August 2016). "What does the Web remember of its deleted past? An archival reconstruction of the former Yugoslav top-level domain".New Media & Society.18 (7):1103–1119.doi:10.1177/1461444816643790.ISSN1461-4448.S2CID2906701.
