14 DAY TRIAL // People have expressed fear that bit.ly, the world's most popular URL shortening service, might experience downtime if the Libyan government decides to shut down Internet in the country.
The wave of social unrest that currently sweeps through the Arab world is forcing governments to take radical measures like cutting off the Internet in order to prevent protesters from coordinating using social media websites.
Egypt was first to enforce such a measure after the protests against Hosni Mubarak's regime escalated.
Even though the decision was unsuccessful at stopping demonstrators from eventually toppling the regime, governments that face similar outcomes are currently considering the same approach.
Since the beginning of last week Internet traffic in Bahrain has declined significantly, the government blaming "overwhelmed Internet circuits" for the problem.
It wasn't like the total Internet blackout experienced by Egypt, but it still prevented a lot of people from going online.
According to network security firm Arbor Networks, Internet traffic from Libya stopped entirely for several hours on Friday, when anti-government protesters declared "the Day of Rage."
This lead to people wondering what will happen with bit.ly and other .LY (Libya) domain names if the government decides to cut off Internet access for a longer period of time.
Bit.ly CEO John Borthwick said there's no immediate danger to the service if Internet goes down in the Arab country.
"For .ly domains to be unresolvable the five .ly root servers that are authoritative *all* have to be offline, or responding with empty responses.
"Of the five root nameservers for the .ly TLD: two are based in Oregon, one is in the Netherlands and two are in Libya," he explained.
He also noted that bit.ly operates j.mp and bitly.com as alternatives and every bit.ly shortened URL can be translated to these by simply replacing the domain part.
Other people pointed out that Mr. Borthwick's answer is not entirely accurate and that if the authoritative DNS servers don't get a reply from the the .LY root zone, the domain will eventually stop working. Since the TTL (time-to-live) for .ly records is set at 28 days, that's the most the bit.ly domain will keep working with the root server being down.