> " ... Romania (22) Scotland (41) Spain (15) FR Yugoslavia (8) "
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.