Eminent domains

Eminent domain refers to a government’s right to seize land for public use, paying its owner “just compensation” in return. This power extends to a country’s digital land—its domain—not explicitly by law but in practice.

Every two-letter domain extension used by websites (e.g. .uk, .ca, .io, .me) belongs to a country. These extensions are called country code top-level domains, or ccTLDs, and when you buy one you are trusting that country to keep the lights on and allow you to keep using it. So really, they are eminent domains that could be taken away at any moment.

Like, just last year Afghanistan shut down many .af domains without warning, including queer.af and Wes Bos’s bos.af (which he talked about on a podcast episode, The Taliban Stole My Domain). In 2021, Notion briefly went dark when its Somalian notion.so domain stopped working. Artsy switched domains after its Syrian-administered art.sy went down in 2013 during the Syrian civil war. In 2010, Libya started seizing .ly domains without notice for violating Libyan law and Islamic morality. And now the popular .io could be in jeopardy after Britain ceded sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

Each ccTLD has its own history, none more sensational than that of .yu (that I’ve read about, at least). Yugoslavia’s .yu is dead, and its story is a dramatic crossover of geopolitical and early internet history.

Yugoslavia’s stolen, splintered, then silent .yu

The tl;dr is that, over the course of two decades, .yu for Yugoslavia split into .si for Slovenia, .hr for Croatia, .ba for Bosnia and Herzegovina, .mk for North Macedonia, .me for Montenegro, and .rs for Serbia. It was a long and winding road of war, theft, and technological innovation.

In 1989, trailblazing Slovenian computer scientist Borka Jerman-Blažič registered the .yu domain from her lab in Ljubljana. This was two years before the Web was invented, two years before the first website. Back then domains were used for things like email between and within academic institutions and research labs.

A couple years later, Jerman-Blažič (I’ll call here BJB from here on out) came back all excited from a computing conference in Santa Fe, NM and connected Yugoslavia to the global internet as soon as she could. That was November 1991, and it meant Yugoslavia was just the 16th country in the world connected to the internet. BJB said herself:

Just as Vint Cerf is considered the father of the internet, one could say I am the mother of the internet in Yugoslavia, the mother of this domain.

In the meantime, though, Slovenia and Croatia had declared independence from Yugoslavia (June of ’91). BJB reported in an interview ten years ago¹ that Slovenia’s internet connection is how word spread of the conflict, leading to UN sanctions against Serbia, which in turn cut off Serbia's communications around Europe, leaving its people in the dark. At one point bombing by Yugoslav army fighter planes in Slovenia also took down Slovenia's email and phone lines.

After declaring independence, Slovenia got approval for .si, but before it went live they got impatient. On a Sunday in July ’92, a group of Slovenian scientists broke into BJB’s lab, stole the .yu domain records, and cut her line to the network with scissors². It took BJB several months to regain access to the internet (which puts my experience last Friday into perspective when I was miffed that Spectrum was down for a few hours).

I’ll save the full story—and related ones, like the Soviet Union's vestigial dark corner of the web, .su—for the book, but to speedrun the rest of .yu’s splintering and ultimate silence:

1. 1994: Serbia (then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with Montenegro) gets back online by recouping .yu
2. 2002: Serbia and Montenegro stop using the name Yugoslavia
3. 2006: Montenegro declares independence
4. 2007: Serbia and Montenegro got their own ccTLDs, .rs and .me (which Montenegro makes good money on, btw)
5. 2010: .yu is officially retired

Yugoslavia came online during a time of political turmoil. The internet was so new that it couldn’t—and didn’t have the rules—to keep up with the changing of nations. The internet is a bit more resilient for it, but we’re left with lost artifacts:

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...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.³

Footnotes

(1) BJB: “When the war began, many Slovenian scientists started sending emails abroad with details of what was going on here...through the BITNET network gateway in Paris. These emails reached various universities and friends with internet connections, who then informed the public. It allowed for a somewhat different picture of happenings in Yugoslavia to come out. Serbia had misfortunes, of course, due to its aggression against Croatia and Bosnia. This resulted in sanctions from the UN Security Council. Among other things, this meant cutting them off from the BITNET network...I warned that it would have really bad consequences if they disconnected the line. People in Serbia were already living under a constant information blockade, as the Milošević regime was in charge of all the TV stations. I explained how the computer network served as a link to the world, enabling an exchange of opinions and helping to inform at least the intellectual circles, but they wouldn’t listen to me, and the line was blocked. I believe this happened in late 1992.” - How does one connect a country to the internet? Aleksandra Domanović. 2014-05-23. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/may/23/interview-Borka-Jerman-Blazic.

(2) BJB: “During one weekend in July 1992, the people who were later employed by ARNES broke into my laboratory and, using scissors, cut off the line connecting my computers to the switch located in the cellar of the institute, then copied the zone file for .yu. The next day, on Monday morning, I saw what had happened, the lines being cut off and the computer emptied! ...After several months, I managed to get a new subdomain, @e5.ijs.si, and connected my computers to the internet again.” Ibid.

(3) Yugoslavia’s Digital Twin. Kaloyan Kolev. 2014-05-23. https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-9/yugolsav-wars-yu-domain-history-icann.