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What does Libya have in common with Twitter? Ask Bit.ly

Posted on August 8th, 2009 by John Yunker

libya_cctld

Bit.ly, the URL shortener now used by Twitter, is not the first company to craft its name out of a county code top-level domain (ccTLD).

But Bit.ly does appear to be the first company to do so with the Libyan ccTLD.

As some have speculated, Bit.ly could put itself into a precarious position should it begin hosting URLs for the adult industry, or any other industry that violates Libyan laws. It’s always important to keep in mind that a company can’t “own” a domain the way it owns real estate.

But this is all just speculation. The registrar Libyan Spider clearly is hoping to capitalize on all the “ly” permutations of a word or brand name. And the fact of the matter is that more and more countries are viewing their country codes as profit centers.

Which leads me to a brief inventory of the sites that I am aware of that use ccTLDs as part of their names:

I’m rather surprised at the range of countries represented here. Montenegro, by the way, has already sold more than 250,000 domains so far. Not bad for a country that’s less than a few years old.

Any companies that I missed?

UPDATE: Thanks to the commenter below I’ve added Tri.im — and I also came across Pi.pe. Any more I should include?

UPDATE 2: Just added Su.pr — yet another URL shortener.

UPDATE 3: Added good.is

UPDATE 4: Added Look.fo.  Faroe Islands. Go figure.

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Written by John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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Tags: Country Codes (ccTLD) · Domain names

8 responses so far ↓

  • 1 [Enikao] // Jun 2, 2009 at 7:52 am

    Maybe : Soup.io.

    By the way, you can access to delicious without the dots.

  • 2 F Wolff // Jun 2, 2009 at 10:17 pm

    I can also think of Identi.ca and Laconi.ca

  • 3 Kurt // Jun 5, 2009 at 2:05 am

    John,
    How about one of Bit.ly’s main competitors, tr.im?

    good call on the potential dangers of such a naming strategy. Aside from local laws, I would imagine political instability could be a concern as well. I certainly wouldn’t be rushing out to register a .so domain name :)

  • 4 Richard McLaughlin // Jun 7, 2009 at 7:54 am

    I got my domain name late, so I could not get the .com version (but I did get all 3 of the domains for my kids). I tried to get McLaughl.in but it was taken too.
    I think that Bit.ly is a good example of using country codes to make an interesting name, but wonder if the US trade embargo people will one day decide to give Bit.ly trouble if the sanctions go back in place.

  • 5 Mark Belinsky // Jul 6, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    is.gd is another url shorterner with the code in Grenada

  • 6 Jim DeLaHunt // Aug 9, 2009 at 4:10 pm

    How about http://ow.ly/ , the URL shortening service which is part of Hoot Suite?

    And Evan Prodromou has good fun with the ccTLD for Canada, as in his microblogging platform, http://laconi.ca/ , and the hosted service based on Laconica, http://identi.ca/ , and https://certifi.ca/ , a secure OpenID provider. Evan also mentions http://kei.ki/ (.ki as in Kiribati), but that service appears to be dormant now.

    I’m guessing this is a longer list than it looked at first!

  • 7 WordPress launches wp.me | Global by Design // Aug 27, 2009 at 2:20 am

    [...] Even though I use Bit.ly on Twitter, I still have concerns about what would happen if Liberia clamped down on its ccTLD (link). [...]

  • 8 All American URL Shortener // Jan 12, 2010 at 9:39 pm

    This article and other’s about bit.ly and libya inspired me to study this issue among web masters by surveying US and International webmasters. my article is at: http://4wrd.us/ahox

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