(for those not familiar with the back story, check here).
Having become clear Libya has no intention of ever releasing the vb.ly domain back to Violet, we have course-corrected by reopening her url shortening service under the new domain vbly.us.
We had originally pursued a number of other 2-letter options (eg xx.yy) to relaunch the service under. However, given what has happened with Libya and the .ly space we decided to avoid any ccTLD that has regulations that were unclear or open to interpretation. Ultimately, we don’t want what happened with Libya happening again to the service’s users, so for the stability and assurance of the service going forward we elected to register a .us domain.
A .us domain, registered and owned by a US Citizen (Violet) and hosted on servers in US (Newark, New Jersey to be exact) ensures that the service completely resides under US jurisdiction and benefits from full First Amendment Rights.
The domain vbly.us also means that you can easily modify your existing urls to work with the new domain. Thus http://vb.ly/yoururl becomes http://vbly.us/yoururl and will work as before. No urls were lost or forgotten during the downtime.
At a higher level, the “vb.ly saga” has been an interesting experience which I will write a more reflective post about shortly. Issues to be discussed range from the wonders of elastic server instances to meet the worldwide media influx through to dealing with a highly sensitive and emotionally charged issue such as Islam and the legal implications of Sharia law.
In the meantime, I’m sorry to all the users of the service who were let down by what had happened. With the .us registration we do not expect this to happen again.
Please follow the @vb_ly twitter account for further developments! You can also track this story on Hacker News.