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The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

benmetcalfe.com

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Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#71

Post by wrs »

jacquesm wrote: post #69
andreross wrote: post #52

All the Lybians did now was scare American and other Western entrepreneurs from getting anywhere near their domain. I was about to have my new startup set up with .ly domain, but now I will move to a much friendlier .it domain (in fact, I would stay away from any Muslim country domain, just in case, including .io). Those who say "oh, we don't own the Internet, how arrogant of us to even think we do..." I want to tell…

What a terribly shortsighted comment. > We do OWN the internet, because it is us who create the Internet. That's a pretty serious mis-statement of fact right there. You don't OWN the internet because it was 'you' (whoever that is) that created it. The internet is a connection of networks, each of those networks could operate by itself, the fact that we've partitioned the address space in a way that allows us to route…

Any country that opens up its national TLD is in fact explicitly asking outsiders to "buy these domains and use them". Indeed, many national TLDs are marketed mostly to non-nationals. The government of Tuvalu apparently makes 10 percent of its revenue from the .tv domain (and wishes it had a better deal with Verisign so that was even larger). It is surely important to the countries who make this choice to maintain good relations with the "American and EU entrepreneurial types". Otherwise why did they bother?

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#72

Post by elliottcarlson »

vog wrote: post #12
jacquesm wrote: post #4

And to add to all of that: If you register a local version of any domain, be it .ly or anything else make sure that you understand that domains registered as such are subject to both local laws and the whims of the TLD authority. This is one of the reasons I've always stuck to .com, .net and .org, just registering a .nl domain for example requires me to jump through all kinds of hoops, and is more expensive to boot.…

> registering a .nl domain for example requires me to jump through all kinds of hoops, and is more expensive to boot This is quite interesting, because in Germany we have the exact opposite. Here, .de domains are preferable to .com/.net/.org, because .de domains are cheaper, registered more quickly with less bureaucracy and provide better data privacy for the domain holder.

I own both a German .de as well as a .nl from the Netherlands and the hoops I had to jump to get the German domain was insane while the .nl took the same effort as registering a standard .com for me.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#73

Post by jacquesm »

wrs wrote: post #71
jacquesm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a terribly shortsighted comment. > We do OWN the internet, because it is us who create the Internet. That's a pretty serious mis-statement of fact right there. You don't OWN the internet because it was 'you' (whoever that is) that created it. The internet is a connection of networks, each of those networks could operate by itself, the fact that we've partitioned the address space in a way that allows us to route…

Any country that opens up its national TLD is in fact explicitly asking outsiders to "buy these domains and use them". Indeed, many national TLDs are marketed mostly to non-nationals. The government of Tuvalu apparently makes 10 percent of its revenue from the .tv domain (and wishes it had a better deal with Verisign so that was even larger). It is surely important to the countries who make this choice to maintain go…

For the most part it is the registrars that enable this, the domain authorities are not actively stopping foreigners from buying these domains but you can't take that as an encouragement from their end. The simple fact that the terms of service are not available in English is quite a hint imo.

And they bothered because they like money, but if the downsides are too much for their sensibilities (with which you are free to disagree, as do I) they can make your life miserable. Just like you're not going to be mooning anybody in downtown Singapore it probably isn't smart to host an adult site on a predominantly Muslim country TLD.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#74

Post by mkr-hn »

ErrantX wrote: post #43
davidw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, rules differ, but someplace like Germany, you can be pretty confident that things will go through some kind of due process that can be navigated. In places like Libya, I would not really bet a lot of money on that.

Well, maybe. But you're also running a huge risk because if they find you in violation the fines start to get nasty. We had a client in the UK that was providing hit/redirect statistics, including full IP addresses, to German clients. Under the rules that is illegal - they were fined in the region of millions of euros for it.

Germany's privacy laws are known and probably available in multiple languages. The concern here is that you might not know the law either because you can't read it, or it only exists when the government wants it to.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#76

Post by piramida »

semanticist wrote: post #9

While I'm as against Sharia law as the next privileged westerner/godless heathen, I found the complaint that the rules weren't in English really amusing. Why should a country's national ccTLD rules be in English? It's a domain space for that country, not for making convenient short URLs for Americans to use on Twitter. Why would a country run under Sharia law want to allow services like bit.ly and others to use their…

Agreed on general point, however the sad truth is that Internet is soon to become Chinese (with their ipv6 progress and economic status), so we better be ready to translate .com rules into chinese to be good citizens ;)

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#77

Post by pyre »

piramida wrote: post #76
semanticist wrote: post #9

While I'm as against Sharia law as the next privileged westerner/godless heathen, I found the complaint that the rules weren't in English really amusing. Why should a country's national ccTLD rules be in English? It's a domain space for that country, not for making convenient short URLs for Americans to use on Twitter. Why would a country run under Sharia law want to allow services like bit.ly and others to use their…

Agreed on general point, however the sad truth is that Internet is soon to become Chinese (with their ipv6 progress and economic status), so we better be ready to translate .com rules into chinese to be good citizens ;)

...and everything was going to become Japanese in the 80's. Funny that.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#80

Post by semanticist »

NathanKP wrote: post #64
mseebach wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'it's our internet and we're just letting you weird foreigners use it' No, he's warning others that because Libya control this particular TLD, and police it using a set of laws that aren't available in English, it's to be considered unsafe for those who do not read Arabic.

Additionally, it is even unsafe for Americans who do read Arabic, because if the site has user generated content, and one of the users submits content which is against the Islamic rules, they may use it as an excuse to seize the valuable domain.

I don't think this is about 'seizing the valuable domain', or the first one they'd've done was bit.ly.

I strongly doubt that this sort of action by NIC.ly is about money, it's about them - probably after having received political pressure - wanting to enforce their local moral/ethical standards on their ccTLD domains, particularly those held by people from outside Libya.

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