Around 6 months ago, I registered the ‘.ing.ly’ domain, largely for the possibilities it presents for entertaining subdomains: surpris.ing.ly, stunn.ing.ly, and so forth. Unfortunately, I never really got around to using any of them. I received this today:

Dear .ly domain user,

Re. CcTLD nic.ly

It is with regret that we have to inform you, that due to unilateral action by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (http://www.iana.org), the Domain Name Servers that host the zone files for the ccTLD .ly have been disabled.

The ccTLD .ly has made repeated official requests to the above authority to relocate the Name Servers to an independent environment, to ensure the continued operation of the .ly zone. Unfortunately, these requests, so far, have been declined by IANA.

Consequently, your .ly domain name(s), along with all other .ly domain names, will cease to function until corrective action is taken by IANA to rectify the matter.

IANA is the international authority responsible for the management of ccTLD functionality. Thereby, only IANA has the power and authority to rectify this problem and reactivate the .ly name zone, consequently, allowing your domain name(s) to function.

Despite our best efforts to maintain the continued operation of the .ly zone, its failure today is totally outside our control. The effect of this is explained in the disclaimer within our advertised Business Terms which each registrant has signed up to during the time of registering a .ly domain name. See our business terms at http://www.lydomains.com/businessTerms.htm.

To get more information or to make a comment, please write to IANA at root-mgmt@icann.org.

Meanwhile, please accept our apologies for any inconvenience that may be caused. We will endeavour to keep you informed of any future developments.

Yours

.ly administrator lydomains.com

Has anyone seen the real story? Now that Libya isn’t an international pariah anymore, are they trying to take their TLD back?

Update (Apr 19, 2004): Looks like it’s back. ICANN basically claims that they had nothing to do with it, and that the .ly people’s DNS servers had disappeared from the Internet. Reading between the lines, there’s still something going on, but it’s largely a case of incompetence. The weird thing is that UUNet was acting as one of the DNS providers for .ly, and I’m not really sure why they stopped providing services.