Muammar Gaddafi
If Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi who has the control over the internet in Libya decides to cut access to the servers situated in Libya could affect the poker industry negatively. Domain shortening services such as "bit.ly" and all the url-s shortened using the service will cease to respond. In practise, this would mean that all the poker players who use Twitter would lose their links.
In an article published yesterday on Time Techland by Jerry Brito, it turns out that only 2 out of 5 nameservers are to be found in Libya, the other 3 are situated in Oregon, US, and the Netherlands. According bit.ly CEO John Borthwick, switching off the 2 Libyan-based servers wouldn't result in the breakdown of the service, as he formulates:
"For .ly domains to be unresolvable the five .ly root servers that are authoritative 'all' have to be offline, or responding with empty responses."
With 3 working servers all bit.ly urls will function, however, it's much more interesting to consider what a new Libyan government might do with .ly domains.
Considering the worst-case scenario, they can impose much stricter restrictions on .ly domains, shutting down all extensions that are found to be obscene, indecent, or sexual in nature, insulting of religion or politics, or be related to gambling and lottery industry or be contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality, so other services like Trunk.ly, Letter.ly, Embed.ly, Graphic.ly are also facing hard times.
