What would happen to *.ly links if the internet in Libya were shut down?

Question

Kim Davies · Accepted Answer

It gives a sense of false confidence to state that country-code domains are impervious to these kinds of government-mandated Internet shutdowns. If a country like Libya decides to shut down the Internet affecting the registry operations of .LY, while it is unlikely to have an immediate effect unless they explicitly empty the registry data, it can have a devastating effect in short order.

John Borthwick in his original answer stated that because the authoritative servers (they are not root servers) for .LY are located outside the country it is safe, but the authoritative servers outside the coun

John Borthwick in his original answer stated that because the authoritative servers (they are not root servers) for .LY are located outside the country it is safe, but the authoritative servers outside the country are reliant on being capable of obtaining updates from the .LY registry inside the country. If they are unable to succeed in getting updates, at some point they will consider the data they have stale and stop providing information on the .LY domain.

In the case of .LY, the absolute maximum for that is configured for 28 days (SOA expiry TTL is 2419200 seconds). Without external intervention, the availability of .LY domains would be compromised somewhere between 0 and 28 days if the Libyan registry is cut off the Internet.

Dave Black · Answer

We considered the possibility of a number of dodgy situations when we registered our .ly domain last year.  So currently, we are (despite stealth mode) doing a redirection from things.ly to our thingsly.com domain.

When registering a foreign domain, it's worth considering the following...
 
Could they mandate a recall of foreign-owned domain names?  
Could they require that a company have a local presence or local partners? Could they tax the domain owners to the point where it hurts?  
Could the registrar be easily "incentivized" to transfer your domain to someone else or hold it for themselves?  
Does the country have a judicial system which upholds contracts with foreign entities?

Despite this, you can't deny that the "ly" domains have a playful ring to them.  We'd like to base our brand on it but we'll wait and see.

UPDATE:  Mar 16, 2011
I just received the following notice from our .ly registrar.  (http://libyanspider.com/m/announcements.php?id=19)
-----------------begin ---------------------------
With recent events of unrest in Libya, many of our clients and also our partners have reached out to us concerned for our well being and safety. We would like to take this opportunity to personally thank all those who have reached out to us and truly appreciate whole-heartedly for their attention and compassion.

We realize and understand the concerns that .ly domain owners might have regarding the future of .ly and whether they are in any danger of malfunctioning. We, at Libyan Spider, felt it was necessary to release a statement to answer and put at ease the worries that you may have regarding your .ly domains.

.ly top-level domain works on five .ly root servers. Two are located in Libya, two are in the United States, and one is in Europe. In order for a .ly domain to stop working, all five must be offline or transmit empty responses. The Libyan servers are not in danger of being offline due to the fact that GPTC (General Post and Telecommunication Company), which controls the Internet in Libya and is also the legal representative and registry of .ly, has taken care of this issue by listing the Libyan .ly root servers in a “white list.”

Despite the Internet connection to and from Libya being temporarily suspended, the communication and synchronization between the root servers takes place. Hence, .ly domains will not be affected and will continue to run. For your information, the Internet within the country is fully on.

Currently there is no access to nic.ly web site from outside Libya, so if someone needs to change the whois details including name servers, he or she can ask our Libyan Spider staff and we will execute any necessary changes from Tripoli.

If your domain names are up for a renewal, you will still receive the notification from the registry, and the renewals are done as usual via your Libyan Spider account. Our servers are hosted outside Libya and hence are accessible from the rest of the world.

Libyans, including the Libyan government, also use .ly domains. Shutting down .ly zone would not only affect international domain owners, but also the Libyan domain owners including the Libyan government. The only missing bit at the moment is the Internet connection between Libya and the outside world and we are looking forward for it to be restored soon.

We hope this answers any raised questions. Should you need any further clarification or help, we will be there for you to help. We thank you for choosing Libyan Spider and appreciate your business.
-------------------  end -------------------

John Borthwick · Answer

Should Libya block Internet traffic, as Egypt did, it will not affect http://bit.ly or any .ly domain.

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.

And http://bit.ly will continue to do everything we can to ensure we offer our users the best service we possibly can.   That includes offering options around which top level domain you use.    Many users choose to use http://j.mp/ as an alternative to http://bit.ly, given that it is shorter.  And some use http://bitly.com.

Any http://bit.ly link can be re-written as a j.mp link by simply replacing the domain.  Other customers use our white label options -- where you can "bring your own domain" (see: http://bit.ly/pro/).  http://bit.ly today "powers" thousands such white label domains.   Our job is to provide the best service we can via our sites and our API and we will continue to do that.   For now we can only hope for a peaceful resolution to the events in the middle east.

For more background on this issue, see the status report that ICANN posted, in January, on DNS in Egypt: http://j.mp/eVrqpL

Joshua Strebel · Answer

We were proactive from day 1 regarding use of an .ly domain for our service page.ly (see this post: http://blog.page.ly/2011/02/the-libyan-revolution-and-the-potential-affect-on-page-ly/) I am sure http://bit.ly also has a continigincy plan in place.

Derek Callaway · Answer

There's no easy answer that I know of. However, I'll attempt to point you in the direction of some resolver and name server features which may help. The information that follows applies to ISC (Internet Software Consortium) BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) version 10+. The lazy reader can take the easy way out by scrolling to the bottom. 
 
One possible course of action that could be rather effective is creating an IN SOA resource record for an alternative ccTLD domain that you'll be authoritative for which duplicates the resource record structure of the original Libyan zone database files and due to necessity relies on name-servers in another TLD (and CIDR block if you want to be extra careful.) 
Alternatively, increase the default TTL on all affected  zones by modifying the common 86400 (one day) default. DNS TTL's are signed 32-bit integers, meaning the maximum value is 2147483647 seconds, or approximately 70 years. 
 
Verify that all important name-servers are caching all required resource records by simply performing a DNS lookup for the hostname against each one (conceptually, this would be similar to manually  enumerating the response for an IN AXFR or zone transfer query.)  If you're able to perform a zone transfer on at risk zones, then do so immediately to preserve the original RR (resource record) values. Viewing changes made during the update of a domain's SOA record serial number can be achieved with IXFR (incremental zone transfer.) After that's been achieved, the usual name server (upon temporary enablement of recursion for only the domain with the outage using fine-grained allow-query statement rule sets in named.conf.) can make trusted resolvers forward or redirect the affected TLD to a caching-only name server that contains a zone file nearly identical to the original pre-downtime domain database. 
 
On the flip side of this, you could set the default TTL in the IN SOA statement to a zero default so records are never cached (meaning, you'll be able to restore service immediately after the outage when network access returns.) When the proper transactions start flowing again, attempt to piggyback as many common query responses as possible in the DNS response packet by using round-robin to respond to resolvers with RRSets (multiple resource records in a single response packet.)

%3E Although this probably isn't very helpful for most ISP configurations, aside from those that use FCrDNS (forward confirmed reverse domain name service). Any numeric IP address space such as the rDNS (reverse lookup) specific ip6.arpa [ http://ip6.arpa ], in-addr.arpa [ http://in-addr.arpa ], and even the RFC4159 deprecated ip6.int [ http://ip6.int ] can reverse resolve to any ccTLD FQDN desired (one ending in .ly. in this case.) with an IN PTR resource record. 
 
Another possible way out is to define all the hostnames as /etc/hosts entries in a well-known IN TXT record that can be easily scripted to modify the local resolver's hosts file. If the ccTLD does happen to lose service, then cache NXDOMAIN responses by setting the AA (authoritative answer) bit in the DNS header. Another possibility that could allow the name servers to deliver desired records to the intended user base is mDNS (multicast DNS), also known as zero configuration or DNS-SD (DNS Service Discovery) as implemented by Apple Bonjour and Linux nss-mdnsd and defined in IETF's RFCs (IETF documents) [ https://www.quora.com/topic/RFCs-IETF-documents ].  If a CDN is being used, ask how you might be able to benefit from anycast DNS service.

Of course, you could also have BIND completely lie about the entire domain whenever its queried by using the root-delegation-only directive in named.conf. A detailed list of named.conf directives is available at DNS BIND List of Statements [ http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch7/statements.html ] but referring to the source code for the latest version downloadable from ftp://ftp.isc.org would be the most comprehensive research method. If you just want to cop out and go home, then blackhole .ly or change the name servers being advertised by the WHOIS protocol to name daemons authoritative for a zone that's almost exactly identical except there's a typo-squat character and hope that the end user has a browser with support for predictive text which detects the typo as the legitimate site (the lack of business continuity by the previous one should down-rate its order in the AJAX/whatever constructed drop-down list.)

Danny Donahue · Answer

“What would happen if something caused the internet to be completely and permanently shut down, and which country would fare the best or worst? [ https://www.quora.com/What-would-happen-if-something-caused-the-internet-to-be-completely-and-permanently-shut-down-and-which-country-would-fare-the-best-or-worst ]”

Banks, governments and corporations would crumble. Nearly everything is online these days. No more credit/debit card purchases and whatever money you have in the bank isn’t moving out of it until this situation is repaired.

So, yeah, losing the internet at this point would be a huge blow. There isn’t really a country that wouldn’t be impacted in some major way. However, the “third world” countries, those where the people essentially live primitive lifestyles, would suffer the least. Their people would probably never even know anything happened.

The US, EU, Russia, and China would be devastated from the top down

And, my almost entirely online life would be screwed. So, if this happens, I’m going fishing and you guys can sort it out.

Thing is, there are so many servers, so many access points and so many various ways the “internet” actually comes to life; you’re not killing them all without taking the world’s supply of electricity with it. So, IF a solar flare takes out the world’s grid we’re probably all fkd anyway. Short of something that cataclysmic we live online and that isn’t going to change.

Thanks for scaring the crap out of me. Ooops, I mean thanks for asking.

Have a great, and sunspot free, day!

Brett Rylance · Answer

A ‘magical & permanent internet closure’ would be seriously devastating, with the death toll in the millions, if not tens of millions.

* Outside of direct networks, every computer on the planet would only share information by a USB stick/disc/external drive being couriered or posted to another computer. (There would be a global shortage of them instantly.)
 * The only instant form of communication would be through the phone lines again (assuming the evil internet fairy didn’t notice our phones largely run through the internet).
 * Bar the lucky few still with fax machines, all written communication would have to be posted.
Welcome back to the 80s.

But we no longer have the staffing, hardware, processes or infrastructure to suddenly switch back to that method.

* Governments would close all the stock markets (they’d be unable to trade anyway).
 * The food supply chain would have to be held together by phone.
 * 
 * Every grocery store in the first world has automated inventory reordering and management software it shares with its head office through the internet. It’s all made completely useless.
 * Phone lines would be constantly jammed at stores, head offices, warehouses, truck companies, factories, suppliers, farmers, etc.
 * Then they realise they don’t have enough paper to send each other any written documentation (order forms, picking slips, delivery dockets, invoices, etc.).
 * Then they realise that all the sales data from their stores’ registers can’t report even their day’s takings to head office.

Communication would be so crippled it would be extremely optimistic to suggest the supply chain could still operate at 80% efficiency in even the most critical food supply.

So what happens to every first world nation when 20% of its food supply is never delivered, ordered or produced?

Do we just tighten our belts and calmly feed our children potato and leak soup for a fortnight because that’s all that’s not sold out currently?

Nope. We panic and we hoard, emptying our food stocks and making the situation far worse.

* Millions of people, shocked to find themselves hungry, don’t sit patiently regardless of what’s said by leaders over the television.
 * We begin to fight for survival. Looting and civil disobedience begins, with significant casualties in well armed countries like Russia and the USA. Marshall law is brought in.
 * Farmers and truck companies begin to send loads of food into the cities, not because they’ve received any orders or will ever get paid but because its beginning to rot while people starve.
But with all the labour saving efficiencies and accuracies of communication through the internet that large populations have become dependent on suddenly removed, there isn’t the ability to feed everyone in the short term and the world falls apart.

Ondrej Flidr · Answer

Yes and no.

Yes by a law - independent country can ban using of the Internet, providing services, ISPs, data services in cell phones etc. It will ends in massive bussines runaway and country will just bankrupt.

Technicall shut dowm without force of law is way more complicated, because the Internet itself was designed for a failure - basic requirement for ARPAnet (military network in US, rebranded to the Internet and opened to the civil sectors in late 80th) was “Soviets can nuke whole city with ARPAnet nodes out of the map but network must work”. You as a goverment have to controll all transmit channels (not only wires but also wireless - ie. StarLink) in and out of the country to do something with it. China tries do this for several decades, they are close but even them aren’t controlling all data transfers.

Randall W. Jordan · Answer

Ok, assuming your wild premise, There are two answers;

1. The least affected would be the country that kept their Internet up and running.
2. The least affected would be the country that had not been completely destroyed by the disaster they took down the Internet.

Joshua Strebel · Answer

When we started page.ly over a year ago we planned ahead for this possibility (see http://blog.page.ly/2011/02/the-libyan-revolution-and-the-potential-affect-on-page-ly/), However as others have said it is a remote chance the entire .LY domain space would be offline.

Simon Greenwood · Answer

Usually, it helps the government more. As happened in the ‘Arab spring’ of 2011, the Egyptian government attempted to restrict or close access to external news sources to prevent the country finding out what was going on. The Internet is more powerful than TV and radio as a source of information as it is accessible internationally and not under the jurisdiction of national governments and as such many governments work to restrict access such as China’s Great Firewall. It seems likely that this is going to be an ongoing and increasing trend.

Heather Read · Answer

The root is run by IANA and managed by VeriSign. They keep a "directory" of authoritative nameservers (e.g.: addresses) for each TLD (.ly is a country code TLD or ccTLD for short, .com is generic TLD or gTLD).

Those nameservers are queried for second level domains e.g.: http://bit.ly

An ISP will store the nameserver address for a second level domain like http://bit.ly for sometime (usually according to its own TTL or Time-To-Live settings) which generally aren't greater than 1 day.

I believe the government itself still runs .ly (that is it has not subcontracted to a private registry company) see www.nic.ly  Therefore they control the DNS nameservers for all of .ly. If they pull the plug on that anything with a .ly address does not work - period.

It does not matter where http://bit.ly has nameservers.

Mark Needham · Answer

All the answers seem more concerned with 'what will happen to us' rather than 'how can we help the people of Libya'. See my comment to the question.

Michael Bramer · Answer

I don't really have any credentials or expertise to back this up, but I assumed it was meant to represent efforts to quell organized uprisings among the country’s citizens. If state-approved media are the only available source of information on the state of the country, it’s much easier to downplay the true severity of a situation. If the media is telling the citizenry the situation is perfectly under control, and a well-meaning whistleblower leaks video of government forces closing down seaports and organizing corpse burnings, it could very easily lead to mass hysteria, and the situation becoming completely uncontrollable. Shutting down the country’s main means of accessing the Internet prevents this possibility and allows the government to maintain their grip on the narrative surrounding the outbreak.

I'm not sure how feasible this would even be IRL, but if a government were pushed close enough to the brink I have no doubt its more practical members would consider sacrificing the freedom of information a small price to pay for the continuity of the nation.

Mike Nardine · Answer

The only implication of which I am aware is that according to Macafee  Web Mal report every single one of them is more secure that .com....

Robert M · Answer

Absolutely, and they can also control what citizens can access. Control is standard in all dictatorial regimes.

Hadi Naser · Answer

The answer is NO!

There is something everyone should be aware of that all ccTLDs have an 
agreement with ICANN and it is really not up to Libya or other countries
 who manage their TLDs, there is a limit to what they could do with 
their TLDs, you should read the agreement for .ly domain names here:
www.icann.org/en/cctlds/ly/ly-icann-letters-27feb07.pdf

Simply if GPTC violate the agreement ICANN can pull out .ly domain and give it to a different entity that can manage .ly in a proper way and follow and respect the agreement.

Tianren Tan · Answer

Usually when mass stability issue occurs to prevent foreign and domestic anti-governmental forces from cooperating with each other.

Similar happening in India right now.

M.A. Kychma · Answer

Indeed, they would need to delete _all_ .ly name from _all_ five servers around the globe. A mission compared to that of a dropping a nuclear bomb. 
Possible but very unlikely. Probably improbable.

More articles on this subject nicely consolidated in one link can be seen here: http://brief.ly/35h/

Dmitri Snytkine · Answer

US will not tolerate this, the entire .ly top level domain will then be put under control of ICANN untill Libya can demonstrate that it can responsibly manage own top level domain.