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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

#91

Post by ern »

semanticist wrote: post #35
davidw wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's as true for Libya/.ly as it is for Germany/.de or China/.cn. I think that you're a lot less likely to run into 'oddities' in Germany than you are in China or Libya.

I think you're more likely to run into rules printed in English in Germany, but that aside every country has their quirks. It really wasn't that long ago that Germany and France were having a go at Yahoo! over Nazi imagery that was hosted on their services, or for sale on Yahoo! Auctions. 60+ years after the end of the war, it might not be immediately obvious, especially to an American used to 'first amendment rights…

Another "oddity"- Germany also has/had strict laws about using foreign academic credentials, that have tripped up visiting academics: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,540459,00...

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#93

Post by pg »

I think what really happened here is that someone at the Libyan domain authority decided they wanted the name and made up a story in order to seize it. I've heard of other cases of .ly names being confiscated, and for this reason we advise YC startups not to depend on them.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#94

Post by edash »

stevefink wrote: post #13

I still don't get the recent trend of startups branding their businesses around .ly and .io. I suppose it's similar to any "hip" trend, such as gradients and rounded corners, but it always seemed legally risky to me.

Not to mention .tv.

I think many people consider .tv a creation for television and video on the Internet, but it was originally reserved for the island of Tuvalu.

For a time, GoDaddy had a popup when you went to register a .tv domain stating that the island of Tuvalu was sinking and may not exist in the future.

http://boingboing.net/2009/04/30/godaddy-dont-buy-dot.html

If you believe Wikipedia, however, a move in March of this year by Sedo made .tv a safe investment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tv

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#95

Post by andreross »

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…

We own the internet in the sense that we create the content and value for those domains, that otherwise would be just a collection of useless characters. How many successful startups do you know that were created by Libyans? And as far as Sharia law goes – I don't care what they do in their own countries, as long as it doesn't touch me in any way. That also means that if touching their domains means risking to loose your business - I would stay away, and every rational Internet entrepreneur would do the same. That's how WE own the Internet in my understanding.

Thanks for the .it article, I guess I rushed with assumptions. Governments are governments after all.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#96

Post by merrick »

I wouldn't panic yet as a .ly domain owner:

"While letters ‘vb’ are quite generic and bear no offensive meaning in themselves, they’re being used as a domain name for an openly admitted ‘adult friendly URL shortener’. Now, had your domain merely been a URL shortener for general uses similar to bit.ly (as you claim) there would have been no problem with it. It is when you promote your site being solely for adult uses, or even state that you are ‘adult friendly’ to promote it that we as a Libyan Registry have an issue."

There is definitely some risk, so mitigate it and buy the ly.com variant of a .ly domain to protect against this - much like ad.ly owns adly.com, embed.ly owns embedly.com.

Watch what bit.ly does - likely nothing right now. If they get warning like vb.ly says they did, we will hear about it, and then every .ly owner has a problem.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#97

Post by seldo »

mcknz wrote: post #88
semanticist wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they go after the highest profile sites, they call attention to themselves and risk a backlash. Reclaiming from the bottom up establishes a precedent, and allows NIC.ly to own domains before they become too popular to grab. The moral/ethical stance is a complete pretext. If Libya was really worried about morality, they'd do something about their atrocious human rights record.

That's a very western view. As far as they're concerned, both shutting down the "adult" shortener and their human rights record are both examples of their high moral purity. Their idea of moral behaviour and yours differ, is all.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#98

Post by InclinedPlane »

kloncks wrote: post #87
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…

I will only comment on your use of the term Sharia law. The term's widely misunderstood, especially after the events in NYC this summer. Just so that you know, Sharia "law" is just six principles: 1. The right to the protection of life. 2. The right to the protection of family. 3. The right to the protection of education. 4. The right to the protection of religion. 5. The right to the protection of property (access t…

Is this at all representative of the way sharia exists in practice? Can you provide, say, 5 examples of Islamic countries practicing sharia according to this strict interpretation that aren't overwhelmed by the influence of religous and ethnic traditionalism? If not then aren't you just arguing semantics? If the way sharia is practiced conforms to a certain well delineated set of patterns and that differs from some ideal definition of sharia which is the correct definition?

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#99

Post by seldo »

andybak wrote: post #75

Am I the only person hoping that a high profile URL shortener liky bit.ly get taken offline so people learn quickly that redirecting their content's URLs through a 3rd party is a bad idea?

Redirecting your content through a third party like Amazon Web Services? Or Akamai CDN? Or Rackspace?

All small- to medium-size websites are the result of dozens of third party companies -- server farms, network backbones, DNS providers -- working together. Even the really gigantic sites like Google and Yahoo, who really do own their whole networks and all their hardware, use third party services extensively.

In the case of a third-party URL shortener, the other party's presence is more visible but no more intrinsically unreliable. And in fact, in this instance, the redirector itself didn't go down -- what "broke" was the DNS provider, namely NIC.ly.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#100

Post by semanticist »

mcknz wrote: post #88
semanticist wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they go after the highest profile sites, they call attention to themselves and risk a backlash. Reclaiming from the bottom up establishes a precedent, and allows NIC.ly to own domains before they become too popular to grab. The moral/ethical stance is a complete pretext. If Libya was really worried about morality, they'd do something about their atrocious human rights record.

Except, of course, your idea of morality and their idea of morality is very different.

The assumption that your morality is the only one that matters pretty much reinforces the point I was trying to make with my original comment.

In any event, NIC.ly can take back any domains it wants to. You're playing under NIC.ly's rules, and if they change their rules that's their business.

Who do you think they fear a backlash from? If they change their rules to prohibit all non-Libyan registrants, they can reclaim any domains they like. I sincerely doubt that the Libyan government and NIC.ly really care what people moan about on Twitter and tech blogs.

What do you think they're planning to do with these 'valuable' domains? Nothing, because they actually have absolutely no value to anyone who hasn't already established their branding around it.

All these guys want to do is reclaim their country's TLD for their country and to exclude things that offend their local values.

And they're entirely entitled to do that.

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