"The Rise and Fall of .Ly"

"Syria is by no means alone as a complicated country in control of a catchy .com alternative. Montenegro is responsible for .me addresses -- popular for personal portfolios, and also with Facebook, which now owns fb.me. Libya licenses every url that ends in .ly: embed.ly, crowd.ly, Adf.ly, Ow.ly, and all the the “bit.ly” links shortened by Bit.ly. 

The nation of Tuvalu licensed their suffix, “.tv”, to Verisign in exchange for$10 million up front, and $2.2 million annually. That annual fee makes up about 10% of the small island government’s total revenue. Tuvalu’s government has literally paved their streets with domain name money. The coincidence that their country name’s international abbreviation is an English-language pun has become, arguably, their most valuable resource.

How did such a system come about? And is it here to stay?...

In 1997, the IANA under Postel granted authority for .ly to somebody named Kalil Elwiheshi. Despite actually residing in England, Elwiheshi provided, with his application, an address in Tripoli, Libya’s capital. At the time, the IANA did not have the resources to find Elwiheshi out, so he became the technical manager of .ly’s registry.

“A British company [...] acted as collector of registration fees for .ly,”Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace documents, “which it split with [Elwiheshi]. Such arrangements were not at all uncommon with other developing country ccTLDs.”

In April 2004, some 12,400 domains ending in .ly disappeared. The British company managing it had disappeared, too, and for a time nobody knew what to do. According to Bridle, “some but not all” of the domains came back online within a few days, and one “Dr. Hosni Tayeb” sent a cryptic email to all domain holders communicating, in broken English, that everything was fine: “Thank you very much for your concern about .ly cc TLD. People do care around!""

http://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-ly/

This was super interesting!

It also makes important points about the physicality of the internet and its subtle reliance on geopolitics.

(Credit to JL)