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With Libya Crumbling, bit.ly's Future Looks Uncertain. Also, People Are Dying.

by Amar Toor on February 24, 2011 at 01:50 PM

anti-government protesters in libya
As chaos continues to roll across Libya, most observers and media outlets have been busy trying to make sense of the country's horrific violence and escalating death tolls. Web developer Jerry Brito, on the other hand, seems more concerned about another potential casualty of Libya's civil discord: bit.ly, and its link-shortening brethren.

As it turns out, the ".ly" suffix is a top-level domain that's under the control of the Libyan government, in the same way that ".uk" and ".jp" domains are controlled by the U.K. and Japan, respectively. Because the Libyan regime retains ultimate control over the domain, it can unilaterally decide which sites or services can use it. With the country currently in a state of massive upheaval, though, Brito is worried about bit.ly's future.

In the short-term, the author says that bit.ly users needn't worry about an Internet shutdown affecting their links. Even if Colonel Gadaffi were to completely shut down the Internet, as ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak did last month, all bit.ly links would still work, since most of the servers that handle .ly URLs are located outside of Libya.

The problem for bit.ly, of course, is that there's no way to tell what the Libyan government of tomorrow will even look like. Libya's registry policy currently outlaws any .ly domains deemed to be "insulting of religion or politics," sexually obscene, or "contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality."

If Gadaffi ultimately loses power, Brito writes, the next regime "could place even more stringent restrictions on the .ly domain," thereby creating "headaches not only for the bit.ly and Twitter (which uses bit.ly as its default link-shortening service), but also for sites such as Trunk.ly, Letter.ly, Embed.ly, Graphic.ly and many others that make use of the Libya top-level domain."

That scenario, under most circumstances, would seem pretty cataclysmic. But at a time when hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of people are getting slaughtered in Tripoli, forgive us for not really caring about link condensation.

Disclosure: AOL Ventures is an investor in bit.ly.

Tags: Bit.ly, domain, libya, LibyaProtests, links, LinkShortening, MiddleEast, politics, top, twitter, URL, Web

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