CATEGORIES
- WEB STARTUPS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB JOBS
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- VIDEO
- AMAZON
- ALL TOPICS
CONTRIBUTORS
If Libya Shuts Down the Internet, What Happens To .ly Domains?
As we all know by now, there is unrest in the Middle East. You can read about the latest news from worldwide journalists located in all of the countries. The stories are amazing to read and watch. From an Internet perspective, the AFP is reporting that access to Facebook was cut earlier today in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. The AFP notes, “From early evening it was impossible to access the popular Facebook site, and connections to other sites were either very slow or not possible, they said. The state of Internet connections in the rest of the country was not known.”
I had a good discussion with my friend Darren about this issue with regards to Internet access for the people of Libya and Darren raised a very valid question. He wondered what happens to the domain names that use the “.ly” suffix.
Back in October, the domain vb.ly was seized by the Libyan government. Alaeddin S. ElSharif, a spokesperson for Libya telecom and the country’s Web service Department said, “Pornography and adult material aren’t allowed under Libyan Law, therefore, we removed the domain.” Ben Metcalfe was one of the people who originally registered the vb.ly domain name and posted about the removal noting, “This is deeply concerning for everyone, but especially .ly domain owners, because it sets a precedent that all websites running on a .ly domain must comply with Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law in order to maintain their domains. This is especially concerning for anyone running a url shortener or hosting user-generated content on a .ly domain.”
A year ago, the Libyan Spider Network posted a notice that only companies registered to do business in Libya could register a two- or three-letter domain name. Companies that were already registered, including bit.ly, could keep their registrations. Ben ended his post by suggesting that the .ly domain name space is, “unsafe.”
Update: 10pm Eastern – Andrew Allemann at Domain Name Wire has posted some thoughts on this issue. The overall view I am getting is that the domain names would be cached and would live at least for a bit of time if Libya was to disconnect the pipe.
Update: 8:45pm Eastern: Rich Pearson, marketing VP for blogging software Posterous, noted on Twitter, “we will soon be changing to new short URL so you shouldn’t have to worry” — they currently use post.ly as their URL shortener.
But what happens if the country of Libya just turns off the Internet all together? Last week Twitter client Tweetdeck launched deck.ly, a service that allows you to write long messages which are partially posted on Twitter. What about popular URL shortener bit.ly? Or embeddable content service embed.ly? The list goes on and on…
And if Libya decides to turn off access to Twitter as they have apparently done with Facebook, could they turn off .ly services like bit.ly and deck.ly that are heavily integrated into Twitter?
While I know it’s cool and hip and trendy to have a .somethingotherthancom name, I’ve never been a fan of anything that’s not .com, .net or .org.
So what would hypothetically happen if Libya (or any other country) was to cut access to the Internet. Would domain names registered using that country’s suffix also be instantly cut? I am working to get some answers from domain experts now and will update this post as I get more information.
I posted this after the last .ly shenanigans: http://saint-rebel.com/2010/10/06/feigned-outrage-ly-domains-are-fine-just-respect-the-tos/
This is on more reason why the use of things like url shorteners for anything but the most temporary sharing of links is problematic. If bit.ly goes dark it isn’t just a DNS problem, its a web infrastructure problem with many links from blogs/emails/whatever going down.
Approaching this from the service providers side, yes, there is plenty of risk in basing a service on one of these TLDs, and I’ll leave it up to Tweetdeck and others to have done their due diligence.
Really a risky decision to build a big business with a domain from a country that is known for its instability. What these investors were thinking of?
You act like .com, .net and .org are safe when only weeks ago the government was shutting them down for linking (not hosting) torrents. Guess the only option is to have multiple tld’s.
net access, DNS lookups and managing the root DNS for their TLD are very different things.
I apologize if I missed something, but I think it’s shamefully insensitive of the editors here to not even acknowledge that this issue is proportionally *irrelevant* in light of the fact that peaceful protesters are getting *shot to death* TO-DAY in Libya.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23924674-libya-troops-shoot-24-dead-as-protesters-march-in-five-cities.do
Let’s do a thought experiment for a moment and pretend there are some things more significant than web development and e-commerce, shall we?
I totally agree with you – in the grand picture, this issue is not that important. People are always more important than the technology.
But I am not a political blogger, I am not a news blogger, and I am not on the ground there so I can’t really do the story justice as you note. I can only really write about the areas that I know.
I won’t scrape stories from other places – there are thousands of real journalists doing coverage of the issues – please visit those sites for up to the minute coverage.
I understand, but I feel that at least a nod to the fact that people are getting killed right now is necessary. Otherwise I maintain that it’s insensitive. It’s like if your sister died in a car crash and I asked, “but what about my cds? They were in her car!!!”
I know hackers don’t “have to” care about this stuff, and if it were totally ignored as per usual I wouldn’t comment. But if you are going to talk about the goings on in Libya throughout the day (with multiple updates even, it’s not like this was just a quick post), I think it’s tactless to not mention the loss of life going on. How to briefly acknowledge it in the article? I don’t know, it would be tricky. But you’re an editor/author/journalist, I’m sure you can figure out a way. :)
I am happy to discuss a way to add more to the story – I just don’t know how. I will try to think of something tonight. I tried to start out by noting that the issues are bigger than just the tech but maybe I didn’t do a good job there. Some of my closest friends (real friends not twitter friends) are from the middle east and they have family there – so I am interested in what is going on and hope that the issues can be resolved quickly and without anymore death.
Thanks for speaking your mind – please always do so on all of my posts.
I think your article was completely in good taste. I don’t want it weighed down with 400lbs of political correctness. I clicked on the link to read about Libya potentially shutting down the .ly domain, and that’s what I got. Nice job Allen.
I’m with you Laeus. Having a (professional) concern about the implications for bit.ly links is not the same as being unconcerned about the plight of the Libyan people.
Allen and others have spent time researching this issue to help us all have a better understanding of the ramifications herein.
You’re the one who’s off topic Sequoia.
I’m with Laeus about this. I think you did a fine job, Allen.
Technology and revenue brought in by the Libyan .ly domain will be a great benefit for an enlightened, liberated Libyan government. This is a technology site, and you covered this technology topics in a fair and unbiased way. Good job. No apologies necessary, in my opinion.
“Name” is absolutely right.
.ly has 5 gtld servers published. Two are in Libyia and their addresses are registered to the “Libyan Telecom and Technology” and “Libyan Posts and Telecommunication Network Company”. One of the remaining is with RIPE in Amsterdam, the other two are in the United states.
So if they went away, there would be 3 servers left, two of which are on home turf. Assuming the databases on these servers don’t expire, we’d be OK.
Many DNS servers cache the fastest server to respond, so chances are we wouldn’t notice much here in North America.
[...] of my tweeps just sent me a link to an article questioning what would happen to .ly domain names if Libya decided to “shut [...]
The idiocy was registering a domain that is explicitly under the control of a not-that-American-friendly country.
Co is for Columbia. Herp derp.
Some of you need to make sure you can actually spell Colombia before you get all snarky.
I don’t live in Libya, so I really have no idea what kind of cultural shock pornography might have, but if they want to protect their citizens, I think they are entitled to do so.
Eventually they will make change right? maybe not?
Based on this ICANN publication from 2004 about global .ly outage:
http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-14apr04.htm
“ICANN’s global mission is to coordinate the stable and secure operation of the Internet’s domain name system. Consistent with this mission, ICANN requested the operator of the second nameserver to restore service until such time as the .ly local Internet community decides on an appropriate solution to replace the current caretaker arrangements.
ICANN was not responsible for this outage and has made no changes to the domain.”
If the nameservers are in Libya and they turn off the internet, then it seems like access to .ly domains would cease operation.
I know for certain bit.ly owns many other domains. bitly.com and j.mp. And many companies that use their white label service are hosting through what seems to be the .ly domain. This may not end well.
I have nothing against .ca
This would depend on where your authoritative DNS servers are located; The global pool of root DNS servers would still operate, and would return the DNS server identified as the authority on that domain, but if THAT server were in libya, then queries would fail. If the DNS server for your .ly domains is elsewhere, then lookups would function just fine, in spite of a Libyan internet outage.
Their country, their domains ext, it was a business mistake to use another countries service in attempts to be “cool” or different. Now they likely have to wait and see, there are pleanty of other,local and safe domain extensions out there and people shouldn’t always play follow the leader.
.co is Colombia
And co.uk? The columbian branch of the United Kingdom?
.co is the country TLD for Colombia.
That is why Social Fresh’s URL shortner is from Saint Helena, sofre.sh. = )
aah… and I see Overstock is now running commercials that you should use o.co – but I believe .co is not a country-tld.
the .co TLD is for Colombia :-)
Thank you – I try to memorize all the top level domains but I clearly need to do a better job :)
I think .co is Columbia
Thanks Sean!
.co is the TLD for Colombia.
As for Lybia and .ly domains, I’m guessing they should be fine. The main DNS servers will keep resolving these and as long as the servers aren’t in Lybia, things should be fine.
Of course I should learn how to spell Libya…
Thanks for stopping by Frederic!
The .co domain = Colombia, sir.
Thanks Louis!
COlumbia. You may have heard of it
I used to drive through Columbia all the time on my drives from Atlanta to Charlotte…