What are the country-specific top-level domains that ICANN has deleted?
domain.world
Since ICANN was founded in 1998, only five country code TLDs have been removed from the DNS root. Let’s take a look.
1.yu — Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1992 amid a bloody civil war, but it wasn’t until 2010 that ICANN finally removed .yu from the root.
In the 1990s, the breakaway nations of Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were all assigned their own new country codes — .si, .hr, .mk, and .ba — but the now-independent nation of Serbia and Montenegro, originally known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, continued to use .yu.
When the country was renamed the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, the ISO list was updated to assign it the new code .cs, but the corresponding country code TLD was never actually delegated until the country broke apart again in 2006 and received the country code .rs and .me the following year.
The .rs registry RNIDS continued to operate the .yu domain for several years while it transitioned registrants to the new country top-level domain. The process was not without its problems, and ICANN had to keep the .yu domain longer than originally planned, ultimately deleting it on April 1, 2010.
2.tp — Portuguese Timor
East Timor, or Timor-Leste as we know it today, was known as Portuguese Timor in the early 2000s, when it was occupied by Indonesia. Its country code top-level domain was .tp.
After the country gained independence in 2002, it was renamed East Timor and ISO assigned it a new code, TL, removing TP from its list.
IANA delegated .tl to the local government in 2005 and encouraged .tp registrants to migrate, but it took a full decade before it removed .tp from the root in February 2015.
3.zr — Zaire
The first country code top-level domain removed by IANA under ICANN’s supervision was .zr, as it was no longer needed after Zaire changed its name to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and received the code CD from ISO in 1997.
The pre-ICANN IANA delegated .cd to the newly named country in 1997, and the registry operator set about moving the .zr domain to .cd. By 2001, the process was complete and .zr was removed from the root.
4.an — Netherlands Antilles
The Netherlands Antilles were a group of former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean until 2010, when the territory was split and its constituent islands received new status under Dutch law. The country code top-level domain (ccTLD) was .an.
Curacao received .cw, Sint Maarten received the sexy-sounding .sx, and Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba shared .bq. ISO removed AN from its list.
The transition was a little more complicated than usual, as .an registrants had to move to a new country top-level domain based on the island they were on, but the local government managed it well and within five years .an was gone.
5.um — United States Minor Islands
This domain is unique in that it was deleted, apparently because the registry no longer cared about it.
United States Minor Islands are islands belonging to the United States that are sparsely populated but strategically located. There are eight small islands in the Pacific Ocean and one in the Caribbean.
Its country code top-level domain was operated by the University of Southern California until 2006, when someone at ICANN noticed that it seemed broken. When it asked USC for an explanation, it was told that "they are no longer interested in managing the .UM domain."
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