On the 30th of September the Yugoslavian Top Level Domain (TLD) .YU was retired for good. Since Yugoslavia was split into several new states in 2003, like Serbia and Montenegro, the TLD has been living on over-time.

The reason for not removing the TLD earlier has been to allow all active web sites to switch to other Top Level Domains like for example .RS (the Serbian TLD) or .ME (the Montenegro TLD), but still at the end there where about 4,000 active sites using .YU which by now is completely unreachable.

The TLDs .RS and .ME are extremely popular to create domain hacks (domain names where the domain name + the Top Level Domain together create a phrase or word). Some examples of domain hacks are webmaste.rs, find.me and blogge.rs, but virtually any TLD can be used for domain hacks. Just check out del.isio.us and Xavier Media's own blog adv.erti.se.

There are other examples of TLDs where the country they belong to don't exists any more, like .SU for the old Soviet Union. From what I know the .SU is still active and there are no plans of removing it in the near future which is weird since the Soviet Union stopped existing as a country in 1991. ICANN has expressed intentions to terminate the .SU TLD, and the IANA states that the domain is being phased out, but lobbyists claim that they have started negotiations with ICANN on retaining the domain and registrations of new domains under .SU is still possible. In the first quarter of 2008, .SU registrations increased by 45%, which may be in violation of the ICANN policies. But since ICANN have plans to allow new TLDs for anyone willing to pay for it, it shouldn't be any problems to keep .SU (right? ).

You may also be interested in...
.ME Sunrise Starts
Don't miss the re-launch of .MX
Why is .SU still active?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 10:57 am and is filed under Domain names, The World According to Xavier. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.