Yugoslavia's Digital Twin – When a country's internet domain outlives the nation
> After years of bureaucratic delays, the domain was finally shut down in 2010. Over 4,000 websites, some of the earliest examples of internet culture from the region, suddenly became inaccessible via their original domain. For many, the deletion of .yu represented the final loss of the former country, the erasure of its digital identity.
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> With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records. Gone are firsthand accounts of the NATO bombing and the Kosovo War; the mailing lists that scientists used to update their colleagues on the progress of the conflict; nostalgic forums and playful virtual nation experiments.
Interestingly, Kosovo is in multiple organizations that fall under "UN Specialized Agencies" (IMF, World Bank, etc.) and as such should have received a ccTLD over 10-15 years ago as per the UN's rules.
Instead, they have to keep the temporarily assigned .xk which the UN confirmed can never be a permanent ccTLD.
What is going to happen to all .xk sites once the UN finally gets around to publishing the bulletin on Kosovo's country code?
It is a very sad thing to remove TLD for any country, no matter if it does not exist anymore. As the author underlined, tons of valuable and interesting historical resources are lost for good. ICANN should change this rule, IMHO.
Not sure what this article is about. A country with the name of Yugoslavia continued to exist all throughout the 90s. The article argues it was some kind of an imperialistic claim, but ... whatever? It still existed and it was called like this. They took part in the FIFA world cup 1998 under the name? I find it strange that the article pretends this doesn't matter and matter of factly deals with the "curious" case of a country not existing, but its domain existing.
If they wanted to deal with this case, they had the .su domain of the Soviet Union, which still exists.
There is errors about how ICANN set country code TLD.
ISO 3166 is just a base proposition, the.uk (United Kingdom) is a bad example because the ISO 3166 code is GB (Great Britain).
There's an archive of the biggest BBS of the time that they failed to mention
Now that we have .porn, .sex, .win, .gay, .casino TLDs, I see no reason in TLDs deletion for whatever reason. If a country ceases to exist, just let this TLD be re-registered under the current conditions for registering custom TLDs. No?
>Kosovo, for example, is still not a member of the U.N. and, as a result, does not have an official TLD
So what about .tw?
Those two emails in the article hit hard
There is a documentary about Yugoslav internet: https://vimeo.com/95833310
".yu domain expires today (30/Sept/2009)" 24 points by blazzerbg on Sept 30, 2009; 23 comments
I once had to "clean up" the digital presence of someone who had committed suicide (because of how youth services treated him, years before it actually happened).
Delayed it for months. Still felt incredibly bad when I finally did do it.
.su is still around, but the Soviet Union is not a thing for 33 years...
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https://archive.ph/oxUel (original website does not work No-JS)
Is there a useful meaning to the term "digital twin"? It seems to be used to mean whatever the author feels like in a given article.
Another case why the Internet Archive is one of the most important organizations of our time. A lot of people attribute this to the rewrite of history, and the far-right wing parties across the planet abuse misinformation propaganda strategies to an extent never seen before - exactly because of this phenomena.
Google nowadays can't even find links from 10 years ago, let alone not show me stupid ads that have nothing to do with the search terms. The social internet ruined accreditability and transparency of where the information comes from.
We need to fix this. Otherwise the people in power will be the people that control misinformation (which, globally speaking, is AIMS, Team Jorge, and Russia right now).
I’ve spent a lot of time in the Balkans, and one interesting real world equivalent to this domain is that a lot of older ex-Yugoslavians, especially ones that went abroad in the 90s, still identify themselves primarily as Yugoslavians and not as Serbians, Croats, etc. Maybe a bit of it is nostalgia, but I think a similar thing might happen if America broke up into separate countries. You’d still have a sizable amount of people that identify more as Americans than as Californians/New Yorkers/etc.
For too long I thought .su was for Sudan and maybe they were just unwilling to cancel TLDs as long as you paid. But nope.
> the X.25 messages would get converted back into internet
*twitch*
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Until today I thought that the most widely used second-level domain .co.yu stood for "Commonwealth", like in .co.uk.