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Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

aaronpigeon.com

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Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

#11

Post by tptacek »

dkasper wrote: post #5

What's the point in putting domain names under the control of a country these days anyway? I understand that Lybia or some organization therein collects a fee from people registering .ly domains, but it would certainly be possible to still pay them the fee without giving them the power to "turn off" domain names without cause. They could even retain the right to refuse to sell domains to people, but once you've bough…

The ISO country code domains aren't a public good; they're allocated to their respective countries, to use as they wish. Libya is within its rights not to allocate any domain names at all.

Conceptually within the DNS, there is no difference between APPLE.COM. and LY. You wouldn't expect Apple to allow random people to set up names under APPLE.COM. John Postel oversaw a decision, multiple decades ago, to allocate countries their two-letter ISO code; if you want to blame someone, blame Postel.

I personally think it's a reasonable policy, and that the fault lies in people willing to do business with a manifestly evil country for the sake of a vanity domain.

Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

#12

Post by ryanwaggoner »

simonw wrote: post #8
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #2

The author didn't really elaborate on what makes this really troubling: the tens (hundreds?) of millions of existing shortlinks out there in the wild right now that would be worthless (or worse, directed to spam or abusive sites). Generally, it's bad, but maybe not the end of the world if a startup loses their domain. But this seems like it would be an unmitigated disaster for a service like bit.ly. I hope they're ag…

bit.ly have been running j.mp for quite a while - I've used that instead of bit.ly whenever I needed a short URL with statistics tracking.

Doesn't matter if most of the links being generated are still at bit.ly. The issue isn't switching to a new domain after the fact; bit.ly has all the data for all those links and could setup a new domain right away, but all the old bit.ly links are still embedded all across the web. Getting those changed is the hard part.

Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

#13

Post by [deleted] »

alain94040 wrote: post #3

It's potentially extremely dangerous for bit.ly. Most other foo.ly startups can happily rename themselves fooly.com, but for bit.ly, there are so many existing links out there, and shortness is so important, that the transition would be much more painful. That being said, no serious investor would have put $10M on bit.ly just because it's 5 characters long. The analytics or something else is where the value is, and t…

[deleted]

Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

#14

Post by tptacek »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #12
simonw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bit.ly have been running j.mp for quite a while - I've used that instead of bit.ly whenever I needed a short URL with statistics tracking.

Doesn't matter if most of the links being generated are still at bit.ly. The issue isn't switching to a new domain after the fact; bit.ly has all the data for all those links and could setup a new domain right away, but all the old bit.ly links are still embedded all across the web. Getting those changed is the hard part.

Or, Libya could go crazy, decide to fuck with the rest of the world, and have every bit.ly link redirect somewhere that will blow up IE, Firefox, Flash, Quicktime, and Reader.

Crazy-er, I mean.

Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

#15

Post by tptacek »

sjtgraham wrote: post #7

I remember reading that nic.ly or their agents made some effort to contact vb.ly's owners to discuss their concerns with vb.ly, but received no response. The author attempts to paint nic.ly et al as being capricious, but it seems to me there were some attempts made to resolve this amicably.

I think the analysis in this article stands even if you don't buy VB.LY's story about NIC.LY.

Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

#16

Post by aresant »

Is it really a story that an Islamic nation would shut down a pornographer?

That seems like that is a foregone conclusion, whereas bit.ly is an incredibly visible, legitimate service.

Libya has had a tumultuous few decades, but today they're in the United Nations Security Council, have paid reparations for terrorism, and their president is the Chairman of the African Union.

Why would they destroy a partnership with the most visible silicon valley company to have any association with their country?

Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

#17

Post by sbov »

alain94040 wrote: post #3

It's potentially extremely dangerous for bit.ly. Most other foo.ly startups can happily rename themselves fooly.com, but for bit.ly, there are so many existing links out there, and shortness is so important, that the transition would be much more painful. That being said, no serious investor would have put $10M on bit.ly just because it's 5 characters long. The analytics or something else is where the value is, and t…

This may be going out on a limb here, but investors invest assuming you aren't going to lose your domain name. Especially if its based upon traction.

Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

#18

Post by bigiain »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #10
Macha wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily all bit.ly links are the sane for j.mp. Telling people to change them will be harder though.

Yeah, the difficult part is changing all those links all over the web; after all, bit.ly still has the metadata and could setup a new domain for it in a few hours. The problem is getting hundreds of thousands (or millions) of sites to change all those links. And what's worse is that Libya wouldn't even have to break the functionality; they could just introduce spam, ads, phishing, malware, etc. along the way. Bit.ly…

"all over the web?"

Do people really use URL shorteners for anything other than Twitter? (and,perhaps Rickrolling?)

I suspect you could delete every url shortener database right now, and after a week nobody would even notice. I'm pretty sure the majority of shortener uses are for Twitter (for obvious reasons, and who reads tweets more than a few days old?) and for intentional hiding of destination urls (Oh look, I'm pretending to provide useful information, instead I'm linking you to a funny cat picture!). I find it hard to believe any information or knowledge hidden behind bit.ly links is of any real value in improving the human condition...

(but I've been seriously wrong about emergent behavior amongst the general public before... I fully expect to have someone point out phd research papers with all the citations done with bit.ly links now...)

Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

#19

Post by citricsquid »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #12
simonw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bit.ly have been running j.mp for quite a while - I've used that instead of bit.ly whenever I needed a short URL with statistics tracking.

Doesn't matter if most of the links being generated are still at bit.ly. The issue isn't switching to a new domain after the fact; bit.ly has all the data for all those links and could setup a new domain right away, but all the old bit.ly links are still embedded all across the web. Getting those changed is the hard part.

They can probably just do a find and replace for the entire internet :-)

I remember seeing that bit.ly and maybe tr.im had an "open" approach to URLs and formed some sort of service where they allowed anyone to easily replicate their URL database? I can't find any trace if it though, so I might have the wrong services, but that might be a possible solution, companies like Twitter could utilise that to "rescue" a large number of links.

Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea

#20

Post by bigiain »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #10
Macha wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily all bit.ly links are the sane for j.mp. Telling people to change them will be harder though.

Yeah, the difficult part is changing all those links all over the web; after all, bit.ly still has the metadata and could setup a new domain for it in a few hours. The problem is getting hundreds of thousands (or millions) of sites to change all those links. And what's worse is that Libya wouldn't even have to break the functionality; they could just introduce spam, ads, phishing, malware, etc. along the way. Bit.ly…

Oh, and "fixing it in the DNS or browser" is just wrong wrong wrong.

Are you _really_ suggesting that IANA or Microsoft/Mozilla/Apple/Google ought to be allowed to "hijack" some of Libya's .ly domain space, just to prop up the flawed business model of some dipshit little company ???

That way lies madness...

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