The Dangers of foreign TLDs
The domain “vb.ly” was recently revoked and the site taken offline by NIC.ly, the body that controls Libyan web addresses because it apparently violated several Islamic laws. The domain was advertised as “the Internet’s first and only sex-positive link shortener service”, where links are never “family friendly” filtered.
Below an excerpt of the e-mail sent to owner of the domain, Violet Blue, a sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle:
“I think you’ll agree that a picture of a scantily clad lady with some bottle in her hand isn’t what most would consider decent or family friendly.
While letters ‘vb’ are quite generic and bear no offensive meaning in themselves, they’re being used as a domain name for an openly admitted ‘adult friendly URL shortener’. Now, had your domain merely been a URL shortener for general uses similar to bit.ly (as you claim) there would have been no problem with it. It is when you promote your site being solely for adult uses, or even state that you are ‘adult friendly’ to promote it that we as a Libyan Registry have an issue.
While our ccTLD [country code top-level domain] is open for registrations from all around the World, and we pride ourselves on being the online destination for many well known websites internationally, our rules and regulations, and our Country’s Law and Morality do not allow any kind of pornography or its promotion.”
Mr. Alaa ElSharif from NIC.LY
This action has certainly frightened several other domain owners who have also registered their domain on the Libyan country top level domain (ccTLD), most notably the immensely popular URL shortening service bit.ly (that has just closed a $10 million Series B financing) , and whose owners must surely have sighed with relief after reading the part that says “had your domain merely been a URL shortener for general uses similar to bit.ly (as you claim) there would have been no problem with it.”
Why in the world would anybody want to use a Libyan domain remains a marketing mystery. There are many other countries with cool suffixes that aren’t prone to have those kind of restrictions, such as .cc from Cocos (Keeling) Islands, .fm from the Federated States of Micronesia or .tv from Tuvalu that receives around $4m annually for foreign use of their coveted TV-sounding domain.
But in any case, there is a clear lesson to be learned from this unfortunate event. When you buy a foreign domain name, you need to know all about the laws pertaining to trademarks, censorship and intellectual property rights of the country that ultimately governs your domain property, in the same way that you would certainly do if you were to buy a house or a piece of land in that country.
* RackNine can provide you with registrations and ownership of foreign and Canadian .ca domains.
RackNine maintains the technical aspect of your domain through our domain name servers (DNS), although full control of your domain will always remain with you.
For more information and to register your domain, please visit:
RackNine Domain Registration
Vlae Kershner
Violet Blue is not a sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, any longer.
She resigned because she claims that “SFGate won’t fix their offensive changes to my archives or promise not to alter my work. SF no longer has a sex columnist.”
SFGate replied that “It’s a standard way the archives are being treated. Her archives are not being treated any differently or altered in any way differently than anyone else’s.”
Violet Blue
Here’s what really happened.
I noticed that SFGate was republishing my column’s archives in ways that initially struck me as bizarre. Because SFGate’s internal search is powered by Yahoo, I use Google to quickly find my columns when I wish to link to them. I was preparing a blog post that would include a link to my interview with former porn star Jennie Ketcham (Penny Flame) about her graceful departure from porn. The column focused on her sex-positive attitude about her past; this subject was remarkable because she was not ashamed of her porn past, but had simply decided to move on.
My Google search results did not return my column’s original archive, as it always had in the past. Instead the top results were a copy of my column on an SFGate subdomain (articles.sfgate.com). The column had been stripped of all links, and divided across several pages. My bio was missing, as were all the comments. Freakishly, all the commas were gone. And the URL had been changed. The address was comprised of words; to my horror the URL had been keyworded to say “ashamed porn star” — the exact opposite of the article’s content. Worse, when I clicked around on the articles.sfgate subdomain I couldn’t navigate, couldn’t find content by author (or find anything), and was essentially trapped in a dead end of static content and ads.
More here
Wright Powers
I know foreign TLDs aren’t ideal but doesn’t really mean anything on the net? I’m not altogether sure…
Will I have any issues with them in a normal scenario?
Tim Promagier
I found out Google says that “Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We’re more likely to know that http://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than http://www.example.com/de or de.example.com.”
I don’t get it, what are the benefits of registering a Libya domain??? I’m sure there isn’t much of an Internet scene down there
Edward Thomson
In case anyone is interested IANA maintains a list of top-level domains here
http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
Ganigfoancz
torebki dejwid dzons listonoszki , TLD torebki torebki skórzane torby damskie web tojolski, domaini donus patern
Sara Pinnerton
It was very interesting for me to read this article. Please thank the author for such topics and everything connected to them. I definitely will think twice now before buying a foreign domain specially from Libya, hopefully things get better too!
Oregon
Except for rare cases, most TLDs are always a bad deal, because you never know whats gonna happen to foreign countries. Just look at Lybya that uses ly, all those are regretting now
Rack Nine
The armed conflict in Libya has made its first .ly victim. An email subscription service called Letter.ly announced loosing its domain name because it couldn’t renew it.
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