[ryanwaggoner]

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 has effectively put billions of intentional clicks in the hands of the exact wrong person.

The right way to fix this if it all goes to shit would probably be at the DNS or browser level. At least then you have fewer people that you have to convince to change.

[bigiain]

"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...)

[bigiain]

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 <soundfx accent='Arrington'>dipshit little company</soundfx> ???

That way lies madness...

[ryanwaggoner]

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.

[bigiain]

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...

[ryanwaggoner]

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.