Y2K meet Y2K.redux -- bit.ly, nyti.ms, act.ly, ofa.ob...
You would think that the near global disaster of Y2K would have been warning enough against using two digits instead of three or four. In this new case, the dangers may not be as great, but the excuses are less worthy. And again techies are making decisions with huge policy and long term effects without warning the managers and lawyers who might know better. If a managers or lawyers knew that Gaddafi had more oversight over parts of their web content then their own company or even their own country’s government, may be they would put a kibosh on this short-sighted policy.
To have fun learning of the bizarre connections of organizations with countries, play this matching game (hint: some of the organizations actually picked reasonably)
http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/match/matchgeneric.asp?filename=tld
And like Y2K, the widespread practice will ensure safety for many of the implementers when the “it” hits the fan. “Everyone else is doing it,” may be the refrain from your techie. Actually many are aware of the faults of using the 2 letter country code for links to web pages and are making smart choices. There are three main reasons/excuses to use country codes from other countries:
- marketing or mnemonic reasons, like .tv for the country code of Tuvulu;
- marketing based on lack of good .com names and like using .co for Columbia;
- Twitter 140 character limit for which real URLs/links may exceed that or at least crowd out the main “tweet” message.
It is that last reason that has created the main market for using alternative country codes. And there are serious political and technical problems with using them. Some organizations are using them without realizing it when posting to Twitter and URLs are automatically shortened. First, most country codes are governed by the telecommunication agencies for that country, meaning that the government might have an interest to interfere with the use of domains under their control. Second, as most of these short URLs are redirects to the actual URL, there can be difficult administrative issues since either the short URL may have problems or the actual web page may be moved. Some of these problems are temporary, others catastrophic, and others may be front page worthy.
Consider yourself warned. And to avoid other preventable disasters, try and check any new technology implementation based on business considerations (not just cost), legal implications, and potential marketing pitfalls.
Hope you enjoyed the game.
Minimum reading list before considering using a short URL system based on a country code.
Explanation of the practice and the foibles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening
List of country domains: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains
Economist article about: http://www.economist.com/node/17249654
.ly MOU between ICANN and Libya: http://www.icann.org/en/cctlds/ly/ly-icann-letters-27feb07.pdf
Links to all TLD country TLD agreements: http://www.icann.org/en/cctlds/agreements.html
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