History of RNIDS

Origins of the local Internet

The linking of Yugoslavia to global electronic networks began at the end of the 1980s. The European Academic Research Network (EARN) was operating in Europe at that time. In 1988, the Belgrade University Faculty of the Sciences and Mathematics¹ suggested that Yugoslav universities join the EARN computer network. Belgrade University became an EARN node in 1989, when the first international connection of the academic network was set up between Belgrade and Linz².

Because the simplicity of the TCP/IP family of protocols brought about the rapid development of ARPANET (which later developed into the Internet), the need to establish a "bridge" for exchanging electronic mail and data between the Yugoslav academic network (based on VAX servers connected to the DECnet network and the X.400 test platform) and ARPANET was soon felt. Yugoslavia got its own country code top-level domain (ccTLD) on the Internet – .yu – in order to make this link possible.

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia academic network development project functioned as part of the Scientific-Technological Information System (SNTIJ) development project, a project led by Maribor University and the Jožef Štefan Institute in Ljubljana. These institutions took it upon themselves to organise the first .yu domain registry, between 1990 and 1991³.

YU NIC

In 1992, when the United Nations imposed sanctions on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, international network traffic was stopped and the country was formally excluded from international academic exchange. With the disintegration of the country, the SNTIJ project ceased, but the .yu domain registry remained in Slovenia.

After Slovenia acquired its own ccTLD (.si), members of the SNTIJ Commission in Serbia wrote to their colleagues in Ljubljana asking that they transfer responsibility for the .yu registry to them.

After receiving no reply for several months, Mrs Mirjana Tasić of the Belgrade University Science and Mathematics Faculty turned to the international and European institutions which managed base Internet services for help. Letters were sent to Jon Postel of IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and colleagues at the RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens) organisation. Correspondence continued until the spring of 1994, when Jon Postel finally ruled in favour of FR Yugoslavia. The management of the .yu ccTLD registry was from then on entrusted to Mrs Mirjana Tasić and a group of enthusiasts from Belgrade University (Dr. Božidar Radenković of the Faculty of Organisational Sciences, Dr. Đorđe Paunović, Berislav Todorović and Nenad Krajnović of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and others), who operated under the name YU NIC – Yugoslav Network Information Centre.

Installing the first primary DNS servers for the .yu ccTLD was no simple affair since Yugoslavia was under sanctions and foreign companies were prohibited from forming any kind of ties with Yugoslav companies and academic institutions. The .yu domain was hosted outside the country at the request of YU NIC thanks to the kindness of the staff of Internet provider MCS.com, on condition that MCS was not responsible for maintaining the registry of Yugoslav domain names.

In order to overcome this limitation, the decision was taken to create the second-level domains .co.yu and ac.yu, and direct them to other Internet servers whose administrators would be willing to maintain the co.yu and the ac.yu domain registries⁴.

This setup operated until 1995, when international telecommunications links were once again established. The primary DNS server for the .yu ccTLD was then moved to the servers of EUnet in the Netherlands, and then not long afterward to the servers of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and the Faculty of Organisational Sciences in Belgrade. The country code top-level .yu domain was located on the servers of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering until its departure from the Internet in March 2010.

As may be inferred from the story of the struggle to assume responsibility for the .yu domain, government institutions showed no particular interest in supporting the efforts of the YU NIC enthusiasts during the 1990s. The minimal financial support necessary for the group to operate dried up in 1995, meaning YU NIC had to adapt to a “temporary situation which became a permanent state of affairs“⁵.

The first consequence of this was that the registration of .yu domains was limited to legal entities only (companies, sole traders, civil associations, political parties, etc.). Additionally, each legal entity was limited to owning just one domain. YU NIC compensated for these limitations to some extent by deciding not to charge a fee for registering domain names.

Because of the way the organisation operated at the time, the rapid growth of the Internet in the country overwhelmed YU NIC to breaking point. In spite of all the limitations, the number of domain name registration applications rose to more than 200 a day, and the waiting period for domain names to be activated dragged out to an average of 20 days.

Reform initiatives

From 2000 onwards, multiple initiatives aimed at reforming YU NIC’s operations were set in motion. In mid-2001 a working group was formed within the Federal Information Technology Institute which drafted the new Rules of Procedure for the registration of .yu domain names as well as the YU NIC Statute. In late 2002 a working group within the National Information Technology and Internet Agency drew up a second draft of the Rules of Procedure on the registration of .yu domain names and a draft Contract on the registration of domains (www.internodium.org/node/1824).

At the initiative of Mrs Mirjana Tasić, an ad hoc working group was formed in early 2005 to prepare the founding documents of an organisation which would take over the management of the .yu domain registry. Besides the current administrators of the .yu registry, the group comprised representatives from local Internet providers, Telekom Serbia, the Ministry of Science and Environmental Protection, non-governmental organisations and others. This group drafted the Statute of the Serbian National Register of Internet Domain Names (RNIDS). A public debate on the draft RNIDS Statute was held between 20th March and 3rd April 2006 (www.elitesecurity.org/forum/230).

Over these years, all the working groups and the wider Internet community agreed that at a minimum it was necessary to ensure:
• the founding of a not-for-profit (cost-recovery) organisation which would operate in the common interest (RNIDS would support itself from domain registration fees)
• the representation of all relevant interests in the process of establishing and adopting the organisation’s policies
• the registration of domains according to the registry-registrar model (RNIDS would maintain the central domain registry, while accredited registrars would enter domains into the RNIDS registry at the request of end-users)
• the removal of existing limitations placed on registering domain names (citizens and organisations would be able to register an unlimited number of domain names)
• the establishment of fair mediation rules for resolving disputes concerning domain names

Founding of RNIDS

In late May 2006 the working group finalised the text of the draft RNIDS Statute, and the new organisation’s Founding Assembly was held on 8th July 2006, with 34 companies and organisations taking part. The RNIDS Board of Governors was elected, which worked to create the organisational, technical and financial preconditions for the responsible and reliable maintenance of the central .yu domain registry. The process of agreeing on the transfer of responsibility between NIC, the state, ICANN and RNIDS was completed.

The RNIDS Memorandum of Association was signed on 18th December 2006 by 17 companies and organisations who in doing so gained the status of founding member. On 12th February 2007, RNIDS was registered as a Fund with the Ministry of Culture and officially began operations.

On 11th September 2007, ICANN took the decision to entrust RNIDS with the management of the existing .yu registry and the future registry of the country code top-level Internet domains of the Republic of Serbia. The .rs domain became accessible on the Internet on the 25th September 2007.

An agreement on the transition of domain names and sub-domains registered under .yu to the .rs and .me domains was signed with the Montenegrin registry during 2007.

Start of the .RS domain

Twenty-seven firms accredited to register .rs domains simultaneously began the official registration of .rs domain names at midday on 10th March 2008. The first day saw 7000 domains registered.

For the next six months, until 10th September, the owners of old .yu domain names had the right to register the same domain name with the .rs extension. There were approximately 40,000 old .yu domain names of which around half were active. In order to ease the transition, RNIDS founded the Commission for Transition to resolve the registration of domains in transition in cases where the .yu domain name registrant was no longer an active legal entity.

On 15th September 2008, all domain names in the .yu registry which had not been reregistered as .rs domain names were made available for purchase. 19,372 .yu domain names were reregistered as .rs domain names.

The management of the second-level domain .ac.rs was transferred to the Conference of Universities and made available for use by accredited higher educational facilities – faculties and institutes. The management of the second-level domain .gov.rs, intended for the Republic of Serbia’s state bodies, was transferred to the Administration of the Joint Services of Republic Bodies.

After holding a competition in which 96 designers and local and foreign agencies entered their work, RNIDS got its own graphical logo and wordmark. At the 37th General Assembly of CENTR (Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries) held on 3rd October 2008, RNIDS became a fully-fledged member of the organisation.

The registration period for old .yu domains was extended on 3rd November 2008. All .yu domains which had not been renewed by 30th April 2009 were permanently deleted from the registry on 4th May 2009. The initial plan was for the .yu domain registry to be permanently shut down on 30th September 2009, but the deadline was moved back by decision of ICANN until 30th March 2010.

Birth of the .СРБ domain

In early 2010 RNIDS initiated the procedure to introduce an internationalised country code top-level domain (IDN ccTLD) in the Serbian language and the Cyrillic script.

On 8th November 2010, ICANN accepted RNIDS’s proposal that .срб become the Cyrillic domain of Serbia and assigned this label to our country as the second country code top-level Internet domain.

The Cyrillic domain .срб became active on the Internet on 3rd May 2011. On 11th May 2011, the official RNIDS website went live, becoming the first local website to use the new top-level Cyrillic domain, at the address рнидс.срб.

Enactments regulating the registration of .срб domain names were approved at the RNIDS Assembly meeting on 28th May 2011, as well as the Statute under which RNIDS became a Foundation, in accordance with law, and the Assembly was renamed the Conference of Co-founders.

---
Footnotes:
1. Today these are the separate Faculty of Mathematics and the Faculty of Chemistry of Belgrade University.
2. This link was initially 4,800 bit/s, later doubled to 9,600 bit/s.
3. The first official administrator of the .yu TLD was the YUNAC Association, registered at the University of Maribor.
4. The Serbian scientific diaspora strongly backed the initial establishment of the .yu domain registry – professors, researchers and PhD graduates at various universities around the world, who at the time agreed to administrate the second-level domains within the .yu TLD.
5. Emergency expenses, such as faults with computer and network equipment necessary for the operation of the registry were mainly covered by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and the Faculty of Organisational Sciences in Belgrade.