.yu domain expires today (30/Sept/2009)
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
It seems to me that all your efforts at maintaining a URI over the years are in vain when your TLD can be shut down.
This is a very good argument to not invest a single sou into whatever the local TLD is in a politically unstable region of the world.
I'm also quite surprised that the TLD actually can be shut down, why not simply close new registrations and keep it alive as long as there are websites ending on .yu ?
That sounds like a reasonable transition period and an effective migration strategy for all of the .yu domains to me. I suppose the standard investing advice applies to choosing TLDs also - diversify your portfolio.
According to google there are currently still about 21,000,000 references to page on .yu in their databases alone.
Imagine getting a letter from the .com tld registry that you've got two years to move all your content over, does it still seem like enough ? Or do other factors come in to play, such as the availability of your old domain names in new places and so on ?
I see domain names as 'given names', your website has mindshare and web presence based on that name, if you're paid up and you had it you should be able to continue.
Otherwise all this does is tremendously devalue localized domain names.
After all, the land underlying the old .yu domain is still there, if people want to hold on to their names I really don't see any good reason why that should be taken away from them.
Personally I've never really liked any of the localized TLDs precisely because this sort of thing happens. It has already happened a few times in the past - .cs, .dd (although it never made it to the official root nameservers), and .zr. The .su (Soviet Union) is, according to ICANN, being phased out but is still accepting new registrations.
But that's not quite the same thing - if your country was changing it's name, would you really want your business to stay with the previous name? If you were "Yugoslav Cars" would you keep the name as the country stops using it? No, you'd change to "Serbian Cars" - same with the domain. You wouldn't want "dot yugoslavia" when there is no such place anymore.