Blue and her partner Ben Metcalfe founded vb.ly last year as a URL shortening service for Twitter and other social media use that wouldn't screen out sexual material and NSFW links as bit.ly and other link shortening services do.
The writer reported on her blog that vb.ly was shut down with no warning when the Libyan registry for .ly, NIC.ly told the pair that their site violated Libyan regulations.
The registry's posted regulations only state that a registered domain name can’t contain words that are obscene or explicit but the registry's .ly reseller, Libyan Spider, actually prohibits the site from containing sexual content.
Although Blue’s site didn’t host any adult content, she said the registry told her she was promoting an illegal activity with her link shortener, citing a photo of her with bare arms holding a bottle and the words “sex-positive” as being obscene, offensive and illegal.
A Libyan Telecom and Technology representative said, "While letters 'vb' are quite generic and bear no offensive meaning in themselves, they're being used as a domain name for an openly admitted 'adult friendly URL shortener'. Now, had your domain merely been a URL shortener for general uses similar to bit.ly (as you claim) there would have been no problem with it. It is when you promote your site being solely for adult uses, or even state that you are 'adult friendly' to promote it that we as a Libyan Registry have an issue."
Blue wrote on her site, “We had the domain for a year and had just paid to renew the domain for another year. For two weeks the processor NIC.ly had told us in vague terms that vb.ly was in violation of NIC.ly and Libyan Spider’s terms.”
She continued, “However, we could not find anywhere in the terms on both sites, where we were in violation, which apply to the name of the domain. We were also told we had been warned to change the domain content of face deletion, but no proof was provided that they had attempted to contact us. Had we known, we would have responded immediately.”
Blue said that no one knew that the Libyan government would begin seizing domains based on application of Islamic law to website content (let alone potential use of an online tool, such as a link shortener).
