What will happen to Bit.ly links when Gaddafi shuts down the Internet in Libya?

"For .ly domains to be unresolvable the five .ly root servers that are authoritative all have to be offline, or responding with empty responses. Of the five root nameservers for the .ly TLD: two are based in Oregon, one is in the Netherlands and two are in Libya."<p>So that's the case if they return no or invalid responses. Would do you expect to happen if they just return wrong responses (as in the case of the DHS domain seizures)?

Curious what their backup plan is for when Gaddafi takes control of bit.ly.

My question is if this explosion of LY domains has been financially lucrative for Libya.<p>I seriously don't want money flowing into Gaddafi's regime.

The CEO said:<p>For .ly domains to be unresolvable the five .ly root servers that are authoritative <i>all</i> have to be offline, or responding with empty responses. Of the five root nameservers for the .ly TLD: two are based in Oregon, one is in the Netherlands and two are in Libya.

This does point to at least a small downside to "wrap-around" urls like Bit.ly: you can ignore the semantics but who guarantees the semantics will ignore you.

I was always skeptical about using a .ly domain. They can start to feed wrong IPs over DNS replication and effectively shut down all servers.

Bit.ly started to require most of their API integrators to use the bitly.com domain.

I always use <a href="http://j.mp/" rel="nofollow">http://j.mp/</a> because it's shorter. =)

I hope people wake up and realize what contra productive nonsense those link shorteners are.

Somehow I image when coming up with a name, potential regional revolution never came up as a concern :)