Even on that very line you've got another entity that's not an ISO country and does not have its own ccTLD, so clearly having a FIFA World Cup team is not quite the same thing as being a sovereign state.
> So obviously "international community" is a very vague term.
International recognition for a country is a spectrum rather than a binary, sure.
> If we were talking about anything material, like who owns an embassy building in e.g. London I'd see your point, but insisting that Yugoslavia not use a .yu domain because it was assigned to another Yugoslavia that received the name three years before it dissolved sounds like not solving problems but having an axe to grind.
A top-level domain is valuable and culturally important in the same way as an embassy building. If you want to argue that states that refused to recognise "FR Yugoslavia" as the successor state of Yugoslavia and allow it to hold the UN seat, government property, etc. were petty and vindictive - well, maybe they were, politics is often petty and vindictive (although I would note that what was finally agreed in 2004 was that Yugoslavia had divided into five equal successors, none of which had a special claim on its embassy buildings, domain names or anything else).
Deferring to the politically recognised succession seems like the best way to insulate administration of the Internet from dealing with those disputes directly. Maintaining a separate/parallel system for listing countries and their names/abbreviations, as FIFA does, does not seem like it would be a productive use of the internet community's resources, nor would it be likely to make the disputes that would inevitably arise any less petty or vindictive.
You stated that the country only claimed that it was called Yugoslavia, but it was obviously called like this, and it was accepted as such. The question of it being a succession state is not really relevant for the name. Its status as a "sovereign state" was also never questioned. Macedonia's name was never accepted (until the dispute was resolved recently by naming the country North Macedonia), and it was always referred to as FYROM - Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. This was again obviously not the case for Yugoslavia.
A top-level domain might be of cultural importance, but it's a big stretch this was the case for Yugoslavia in 1992 when the internet barely existed and the .yu domain existed for three years (according to the article). So in reality it's a nothing burger, unless you have an axe to grind.
> it was obviously called like this, and it was accepted as such
Given that it was embroiled in a dispute over the succession of Yugoslavia for the entire time that it was calling itself "FR Yugoslavia", and that dispute was resolved shortly after the country changed its name, no, it's not at all obvious that it was accepted.
> The question of it being a succession state is not really relevant for the name.
The question of it being a successor state is what's relevant for the domain name though. Just because you have the same name as a previous state doesn't mean you're entitled to that previous state's domain name, just like with the UN seat.
> it's a big stretch this was the case for Yugoslavia in 1992 when the internet barely existed and the .yu domain existed for three years (according to the article).
Who inherits the petty cash tin in the embassy in London is obviously a much smaller question than who inherits the building. But it still all has to be negotiated.
> So in reality it's a nothing burger, unless you have an axe to grind.
That goes both ways though - if "FR Yugoslavia"'s position is that it's a nothingburger then they can't complain about having to switch to a different domain name - and if they wanted to keep using the domain name they had been and it would be a pain to migrate, well, so did the people in Ljubljana. Ideally they would've come to a negotiated agreement to either continue to share the domain, or make a smooth transition - but like with anything else, if you can't reach an agreement on how to split it then you don't get to just take it.
Regarding inheriting a building, you should know that “kindom of (SHS) Yugoslavia” inherited government buildings from Serbia which in 1918 was the only international member state with embassies around the world. Eg. London embassy was formed in 1883.
So it is rationale/fair for the states to inherit what they originally had paid for.
Speaking of inheritance, did the newly created states of Croatia and Slovenia in 1918 inherit their share of Austro-Hungarian debt when they left that union, or did they enter a union with Serbia debt free?
> So it is rationale/fair for the states to inherit what they originally had paid for.
Much like in a divorce, if it's something that has clearly stayed separate the whole time then perhaps, but if it's something the combined state has shared and maintained then probably not.
It's obvious the name was accepted because nobody had an issue with the name. You state yourself the issue was whether or not it was a successor or not, and this is likely mostly an issue of claiming property (I am guessing). Seems fairly logical to me that the country called Yugoslavia would use a .yu domain.
Yugoslavia did not complain about having to switch to a different name - they just continued using it. From Wikipedia:
".yu was the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) that was assigned to SFR Yugoslavia in 1989 and was mainly used by Serbia and Montenegro and its two successor states. After Montenegro and Serbia acquired separate .me and .rs domains in 2007, a transition period started, and the .yu domain finally expired in 2010.[1]"
You can make a case it's somehow really culturally important, but nobody will buy that as it was mostly irrelevant then, thus it's only relevant if you have an axe to grind.
From my point of view, people in Ljubljana had every right to continue using the .yu domain if they wanted to, and they could've maybe made a deal to manage the domain together. But it seems to me this collides with the desire to be independent, so my assumption is they were kind of happy to switch to their own tld. Or maybe you know this is not the case?
> From my point of view, people in Ljubljana had every right to continue using the .yu domain if they wanted to, and they could've maybe made a deal to manage the domain together. But it seems to me this collides with the desire to be independent, so my assumption is they were kind of happy to switch to their own tld. Or maybe you know this is not the case?
According to the article they kept running the domain and using it for email for two years until Postel transferred it to Belgrade. (The article phrases it as though that email use was less important or less serious than the unspecified "work" that the group in Belgrade wanted to use it for, but that smells like a slanted narrative to me)
Even on that very line you've got another entity that's not an ISO country and does not have its own ccTLD, so clearly having a FIFA World Cup team is not quite the same thing as being a sovereign state.
> So obviously "international community" is a very vague term.
International recognition for a country is a spectrum rather than a binary, sure.
> If we were talking about anything material, like who owns an embassy building in e.g. London I'd see your point, but insisting that Yugoslavia not use a .yu domain because it was assigned to another Yugoslavia that received the name three years before it dissolved sounds like not solving problems but having an axe to grind.
A top-level domain is valuable and culturally important in the same way as an embassy building. If you want to argue that states that refused to recognise "FR Yugoslavia" as the successor state of Yugoslavia and allow it to hold the UN seat, government property, etc. were petty and vindictive - well, maybe they were, politics is often petty and vindictive (although I would note that what was finally agreed in 2004 was that Yugoslavia had divided into five equal successors, none of which had a special claim on its embassy buildings, domain names or anything else).
Deferring to the politically recognised succession seems like the best way to insulate administration of the Internet from dealing with those disputes directly. Maintaining a separate/parallel system for listing countries and their names/abbreviations, as FIFA does, does not seem like it would be a productive use of the internet community's resources, nor would it be likely to make the disputes that would inevitably arise any less petty or vindictive.