On Thursday 7th October there was an article on Mashable about the possible threat to the Bit.ly domain.

The .ly are Libyan TLD (Top Level Domain) and the Libyan Government are starting to seize back the 2 and 3 letter domains. Recently vb.ly domain was seized from its owners for allegedly violating Libyan Islamic Sharia Law around adult content.

Bit.ly cannot know the exact content people are shortening and therefore could be contravening the Islamic Sharia Law. Therefore there is a huge risk that they could get their domain seized.

What does this mean for Bit.ly users?

If the domain is seized you will lose your Bit.ly account and any history with these, but also any old links would not work.

Most people integrate their Bit.ly account into the Twitter app such as Hootsuite or CoTweet.  In this instance it will be interesting to see if these companies develop new API for other URL shortening sites such as Tiny URL or the new Google URL shortening.

I’d be interesting in hearing what other people’s view on this are.