First it has to be said that the vb.ly service was reserved primarily for porn site urls. The service was setup to be a way around not safe for work websites but as we have never seen this service before it is unlikely that the domain was a Proxy that allowed viewing of Adult Content but merely a way to trade short urls the same way bit.ly and other services work.
It seems the Liberia which is a religious state decided that the service was not within the bounds of its religious laws. Then they decided to shut down the url shortening service.
I don’t see a huge problem with this because if you are clicking on a link that you believe to be safe and you are brought to a website that you don’t want to view it is not a good thing. If someone wants to find porn on the internet they are going to find it.
The problems that other people see is that Liberia is flexing its legal right to take down a url service that is associated with their country. This should really not cause concern for anyone who didnt just lose a few million links to their favorite porn.
On the other hand there are more then a few services that make use of the .ly domain and there are many websites that make use of other country domains of which they are not a part or citizen of.
While it may be interesting to get a domain that spells out a word by using a country domain this is not how the system was made to work…
If you have any concerns you should consider these ideas.
Using a URL Shortner will make links that don’t point to your domain and won’t improve your search engine rank.
Using a URL Shortner Service if free and not under your control means you can never depend on the links to forward correctly in the future. This is the same for free file and image hosting where the urls often get knocked down from abuse or get recycled…
Placing the core of your business in the hands of a foreign country by using a Country level domain is just plain stupid. It is difficult enough to deal with .com, .net .org disputes which have been around for years but when you probably don’t even speak the language of the country and official you will need to deal with … come on… do it for fun not profit and never expect accountability.
Will the Liberian Government shut down other .ly services.. probably not unless they end up being a source of offense but then again you never know but in this instance people should have known better before they got involved in producing such a service as vb.ly …
I don’t really see a problem here other then the stupidity of the people that started the vb.ly service…
And consider this if someone made an extremely offensive or illegal site that offended the religious and personal values of your whole country wouldn’t you want it taken down …
Liberia is not the USA … freedom of speech is not the same.. and religious law dictates their government …. much unlike many of the countries we live in where our Governments like to stamp out every part of religion believing it is mandated in the constitution when it really is exactly the opposite.
We are all sinners in Gods Eyes … we need to remember that.
