Live data from Hacker News

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

aaronpigeon.com

31–35 of 35 posts

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

#31
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

We already do spam and malware filtering at both of those levels...how is this different? I'm not saying that seizure alone would be enough to intervene at these levels, but if Libya decided to hijack these links for nefarious purposes, then yeah, I don't have a problem with it.

Yeah, if Libya went down the "nefarious purposes" path, we should probably filter at the browser level.

But think down the path you'd need to go if you chose to block bit.ly at the DNS level... Right now, IANA's root name servers delegate all .ly requests to name servers under Libya's control. I'm pretty sure there's no mechanism in place for the root servers to change that to "send all .ly requests to Libya _except for_ bit.ly requests, and serve them ourselves or send them elsewhere", and in my opinion there _shouldn't_ be any such mechanism because of the potential for abuse at government levels - would you want the Chinese government to know IANA has the ability to redirect traffic from domains they don't like?

So the _other_ alternative seems to be to have IANA refer all .ly requests to a new tld authority. Same problem - if you do that once, especially if you do it just to protect a company's profits/business model, how do you refuse a request from China to assume control of all of Tibet's tld?

Suggesting DNS level changes for bit.ly seems to me to open a whole can of very ugly worms...

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

#32
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the bargain Libya struck up with the IETF/IANA regarding delegations under .LY?

Maintaining records so that delegation to the owner of a domain happens. VB.LY owns VB.LY. LY stopped delegating. This breaks the Internet.

This exact same argument says that Namecheap should lose its registrar status for "breaking the internet" when people don't pay to renew their domains.

Similarly, if Apple ever made the mistake of setting up an NS record pointing JROCKWAY.APPLE.COM to your nameserver, they'd be "breaking the internet" to change their mind.

The reality is that there is no technical difference at all between LY. and APPLE.COM.

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

#33
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already do spam and malware filtering at both of those levels...how is this different? I'm not saying that seizure alone would be enough to intervene at these levels, but if Libya decided to hijack these links for nefarious purposes, then yeah, I don't have a problem with it.

Yeah, if Libya went down the "nefarious purposes" path, we should probably filter at the browser level. But think down the path you'd need to go if you chose to block bit.ly at the DNS level... Right now, IANA's root name servers delegate all .ly requests to name servers under Libya's control. I'm pretty sure there's no mechanism in place for the root servers to change that to "send all .ly requests to Libya _except…

I was thinking more of things like OpenDNS and Google Public DNS, which I believe do malware filtering. I could be mistaken, though...this definitely isn't my area of expertise.

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

#34

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…

The troubling fact from an investors perspective is that for a bit.ly, the domain is nearly essential. Investing in a company where such a valuable asset is vulnerable to the whims of a dictator or third-world bureaucrat is unwise, to say the least.

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

#35
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining records so that delegation to the owner of a domain happens. VB.LY owns VB.LY. LY stopped delegating. This breaks the Internet.

This exact same argument says that Namecheap should lose its registrar status for "breaking the internet" when people don't pay to renew their domains. Similarly, if Apple ever made the mistake of setting up an NS record pointing JROCKWAY.APPLE.COM to your nameserver, they'd be "breaking the internet" to change their mind. The reality is that there is no technical difference at all between LY. and APPLE.COM.

No technical difference, but as a TLD, they should be held to a higher standard.
Post reply on HN