I've owned a .ly domain for about two years now (with libyanspider has been the only registrar I know of for that time). While the prices are high, and the support staff speaks limited english, and the site is confusing, I haven't had any serious problems.

The service is as advertised; support exists. When they accidentally locked me out of my account by changing their control panel, things were resolved in less than two days via email.

That's good enough for me. Just remember: you are subject to Libyan obscenity laws. No porn, no bashing Islam.

So would bit.ly have to discard any shortened URLs to something like the 2005 Muhammad cartoons?

I doubt the technical regulatory infrastructure is sufficiently vigilant for them to notice, but as far as I understand their TOS, yes.

If your site is focused on visitors from a particular country / locale you lose the ability to geo-target as you could in Google Webmaster Tools [1]. Other than that you shouldn’t see any issues — check http://nic.ly/ for officially accredited registrars.

[1] http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I hadn't considered geolocation among the issues.

I've used a .ly domain for the past 6 months or so with no issue.

The service is a bit sketchy: not very good instructions and less than user friendly control panel. You also have to provide your own dns servers. After you jump through those hurdles it seems to work fine.

Yes, I've already set up my .ly domain, but I'm more concerned about legal and ethical issues going forward if I use it as my primary domain name.

The Wikipedia article on Libya describes some positive political movement as well as some current negative conditions. But I know very little about modern Libya and hoped to get more input on the country.

Well, read up on Gaddafi and decide whether you're willing to indirectly trade with the country he runs or not. Ultimately that's an ethical decision only you can make, but I think you should make it based on your informed personal view rather than what your customers might think.

I joke that my domain purchase may or may not indirectly fund state-supported terrorism.

As far as my customers are concerned though, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find that 1% knows that .ly is Libya.

We'll find out together.

So many of us have names that end in .ly :-)

Does buying a .ly name contribute money to Libya?

http://or.ly has been taken. sniff

As has obvious.ly ...dammit, dammit, dammit

My life is a history of missed internet land grab opportunities. I suck.

Have you checked obvio.us?

Its probably safe but if you are a U.S. based company, why take chances with a country whose leadership is not very friendly to America?

Would the people funding your company be understanding if Gaddifi decides your company is unacceptable for some reason and turns off DNS for your .ly domain? Would having the majority of your traffic just disappear be a potential problem for you?

One thing to check about - SSL certs. Should you want one, you may find yourself SoL. A lot of US companies can't do business with Libya (& Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Sudan etc. etc.) which can mean any cert requests for .ly are banned.

I can't see that bit.ly have one, so you'd maybe have to handle SSL logins and other stuff on a different cctld.

.ly isn't that bad now, since bit.ly more or less legitimatized it