Are URL shorteners like bit.ly in trouble?

The Libyan government, to which the domain ‘.ly’ belongs by right, has seized another, vb.ly without prior notice, without informing and without giving too many explanations about it except that it contradicts Islamic law by showing the photograph on the right. Long ago when Twitter It has just hit its first big media boom and at the level of users and practically nothing else was talked about, other services that began to proliferate like mushrooms were the so-called URL shorteners, services that, as many of you know, mask a URL, normally long and tedious, within another much shorter, simpler and easier to remember, all this motivated by the limitation of the 140 characters that it has Twitter. By April 2009, Edward wrote an article talking about the single point of failure that all of these services have.

It is curious, but just one of the inconveniences that I mentioned has come to pass almost a year and a half later, the Libyan government has taken away the domain and all the addresses that worked with vb.ly have stopped working instantly, that simple and so terrifying at the same time. Because with all the respect it deserves vb.ly its name is suspiciously reminiscent of another much better known, in fact perhaps the best known, and much more used: bit.ly.

Strictly speaking, none of these pages host material that could go against the Islamic code, but it does host the links to those contents, right where the trouble spot seems to be. It is not very well known whether the case of vb.ly has been only punctual or if it is going to expand to more services, but one thing is clear, if the Libyan government decides, for whatever reason, to wipe bit.ly It’s going to roll a very fat, you’ll see.