Country Codes of Serbia - Two-letter ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2

Two-letter ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2

This code, used also as Internet TLD, was a major problem with the ISO's assignment of country codes to Serbia. All combinations of S as a first letter and any other letter in word Serbia, or even Srbija (in Serbian), are already taken by other states:

The Government of Serbia made an official request that the alpha-2 code for Serbia should be RS (Republic of Serbia), but there is an ISO recommendation against any reference to the form of government in these codes. RS could also be an abbreviation for the historical name of today's Serbia, Raska or Rascia (syn. Rassa, Raschka) which would be in full compliance with this rule (see .ch). The proposal, after an initial rejection by ISO, was accepted in September 2006.

There are at least four examples where the rule against inclusion of government form was broken (Democratic Republic of the Congo has the code CD, Federated States of Micronesia has the code FM, Switzerland has the code CH that stems from country's official Latin name Confœderatio Helvetica, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has the code KP, despite the fact that the codes KO and KA are available), and Serbia had good arguments for the use of the RS code, because not a single one of the free codes beginning with S can be associated with it. RS is also frequently used as an acronym for Republika Srpska, an entity of nearby Bosnia and Herzegovina; this is not a conflict but adds the potential for confusion. Other solutions could have been "generic" SS or SX, although SS was likely to be avoided for its association with the Nazi Schutzstaffel.

As this code is also to be used as Internet top-level domain for the country, there had been rumours of approaching either International Organization for Standardization, United Nations or one of the countries in the list in order to switch the codes.

Negotiating the purchase or usage of the .sj Internet domain reserved for Svalbard and Jan Mayen was not a plausible option as Norway, which administers this (through UNINETT Norid), has a policy of not commercializing or disposing of this domain.

Also, as SB is historic code for Serbia, it was hinted that the country could pursue talks with Solomon Islands. However, it is worth noting that since ISO 3166-1 requires that a code is unused for five years before it can be re-used, this may not be possible even with the consent of the ISO and the previous holder, as users of the standard may object.