"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."
So that's the case if they return no or invalid responses. Would do you expect to happen if they just return wrong responses (as in the case of the DHS domain seizures)?
Yes, this. I think the main concern would not be the DNS servers being lost, but the revocation of domains to raise money, or redistribution of the domains by the (potential) new regime.
Situation 1: Qaddafi's regime appropriates all .ly domains and redirects them to whatever the fuck they want (including clones of the originals).
Situation 2: Qaddafi's regime is overthrown by a coup, junta, popular uprising, or what-have-you, and then the new regime decides to repudiate business agreements made with the old regime, including domain names.
Neither is hugely unlikely. I cannot for the life of me understand why any business would sink the foundations of their brand into the sands of the questionably stable Libyan regime.
"I cannot for the life of me understand why any business would sink the foundations of their brand into the sands of the questionably stable Libyan regime."
Is that any more risky than a supposedly stable US Department of Justice and Homeland Security?
What do you think the motivation for such an action would be?
Disabling the internet makes sense from a crowd control perspective, but what reason would Gaddafi have to take control of bit.ly?
Doing it for money reasons is ridiculous, the value of bit.ly is just a drop in the ocean for a country like Libya. Libya have far more lucrative options if they want money.
Unless Gaddafi's been hanging out on 4chan and wants to do a massive rickroll, I think you're over-estimating the chances of Gaddafi seizing bit.ly.
And they aren't. The nic.ly page says about 10k have been registered, meaning they make about $750k/year. The country's GDP is five orders of magnitude larger.
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.
This answer from the CEO is a bit of a garbage answer because it does not tell who control these 5 servers. You need at least one server outside of Libya and not in the direct control of Libya. If the 5 servers are controlled by Libya, they just need to SSH and run `shutdown -h now`. Then, even if in Oregon, .ly is dead.
This does point to at least a small downside to "wrap-around" urls like Bit.ly: you can ignore the semantics but who guarantees the semantics will ignore you.
So that's the case if they return no or invalid responses. Would do you expect to happen if they just return wrong responses (as in the case of the DHS domain seizures)?