It wasn’t widely known that bit.ly and other url shorteners with the .ly domain designation were registered through a Libyan domain registrar until a sex-friendly bit.ly competitor was shut down for violating “Our Country’s Law and Morality.”
For those of you not familiar with url shorteners, they’re designed to condense a url so they take up less space, which matters in a 140-character Twitter, for example. So the url address for this post goes from:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/10/the_libya-twitter_connection.php
to:
http://bit.ly/aFET8P.
Rachel Slajda explains the Libya connection.
David Kurtz
David Kurtz is Managing Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of Talking Points Memo where he oversees the news operations of TPM and its sister sites.