TechCrunch reported yesterday that Letter.ly, a startup email subscription service presumably based in the US (information is sparse), had lost its domain name “as a direct result of the ongoing unrest and war in Libya.” Effective immediately, the company will be found at Letterly.net.
.ly is the Libyan top-level domain. It’s become popular in recent years among startups looking to create short, active-sounding URLs that sound like adverbs. (See Bit.ly, Card.ly, Smak.ly, Smel.ly, Smile.ly, et al.)
According to an email Letterly sent to its subscribers, the company neglected to renew its domain registration, and the Libyan domain registry, NIC.ly, refused to renew it.
Forgetting to renew a domain is naïve or slipshod or both. But that isn’t what made my jaw drop.
The email continues, without any capital letters for some reason:
sorry for the hassle. it’s amazing that a physical war has affected our service in this way.
Emphasis added.
Or maybe “O R.LY?”
Yes, it’s amazing! A physical war! Has affected our service!
Why, I’ll bet it’s practically unprecedented.
Memo to Letterly: War is hell. Also, in case you hadn’t heard, the regime led by Colonel Ghadaffi is not exactly renowned for playing fair.
Memo to all startups determined to shun the counsel of professional name developers: You get what you pay for.
Oh, and make sure you renew your domain registrations before they expire.
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P.S. Yes, I did recently recommend the Iceland top-level domain, .is, to a naming client. Yes, that meant taking a bit of a risk. But not the level of risk one assumes when dealing with Libyan institutions now and in the recent past.
On your P.S. - I agree, it's not near the risk that dealing with Libya has ever been, PLUS, I thought it was smart because Iceland has been positioning itself as an offshore journalism haven - they're TRYING to get tech people to come and check them out. So, in my admittedly not-very-knowledgeable opinion, good moves all round.
Posted by: tanita | April 06, 2011 at 05:49 AM
Thank you for pointing out the geopolitical risk that some Internet services are assuming by using the cute Libyan domain. I agree that Iceland is much less risky than Libya. Another alternative - .li is a Swiss domain.
Check out Boycottly.us for a site dedicated to bringing attention to these risks.
Posted by: Jonathan Bair aka dto510 | April 06, 2011 at 01:46 PM
Top-level domains like .ly have no actual, physical association with the geographic entities that they represent. An .ly domain need have no physical relationship with Libya; it doesn't belong to Libya, it's not (necessarily) hosted in Libya, etc.
I get the point here about the disjoint between the virtual and physical worlds and their denizens, but I also get the point made by Letter.ly -- namely something (very roughly) along the lines that because there was a rainstorm in Washington DC, where the FCC is headquartered, it disrupted radio service in Los Angeles at KCRW. Not a good analogy, but that's the line of thinking here, I believe -- the actual world intruded in a rather unexpected way into something that ordinarily is quite independent of it. I don't think that they mean at all -- certainly I don't -- that war is an annoying inconvenience, or anything like that.
(That said, how many people who seem indifferent to world events all of a sudden are interested when the price of gas goes up 50 cents a gallon -- i.e., when some slaughter somewhere is abstract until it costs at the pump?)
Posted by: mike | April 07, 2011 at 08:36 PM