I like that one of the successors to .yu was .me
Combined with .it, not far away, one relatively small region which doesn't speak English has had all the best punny English pronoun TLDs.
Speculation: Ukraine and Taiwan will probably have governments in exile, and the world will recognize them. DNS servers of "Western powers" will keep resolving .ua and .tw domains, while DNS servers in ally countries of China/Russia will not.
Who knows which side JD Vance's regime will be at that time.
Something else worth mentioning is that the TLD can continue to exist, but you might lose your domain due to other... factors... outside of your control. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.eu#Brexit
Fun data point on the zombie ccTLDs: in a domain snapshot I maintain (cutoff 20 Sep 2026), .su still has about 43,000 registrable domains, more than 30 years after the USSR. The retired ones (.yu, .tp, .zr, .an, .cs) have none.
The one I'd watch is .io: about 797k domains in the same snapshot. If it ever gets phased out, it would be a far bigger mess than .yu was.
I thought this question was interesting, so I checked it in the domain list I keep (I run a platform for this). I found something interesting: .su is the Soviet Union, which ended in 1991, but even now I still see 43k+ .su domains in my database.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 22.1 ms ] threadWho knows which side JD Vance's regime will be at that time.
The one I'd watch is .io: about 797k domains in the same snapshot. If it ever gets phased out, it would be a far bigger mess than .yu was.