As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the .ly domain has been having problems. It was briefly looking like it was all simple incompetence, but now it’s getting entertaining again:

Dear Client,

Please be informed that on Tues. 20th. Apr. 2004 the official ccTLD .ly website has been criminally seized by a group claiming to be the caretakers of the .ly domain.

The seized website is an illegal replica of the original site apart from the fact that non of the dynamic features of the site work, and a different colour scheme. There are also other unauthorised changes which have been designed to mislead and confuse.

This message is to warn you to keep your user and login details secret. Should you receive an email from any address with nic.ly as the domain name then please disregard this and inform support@lydomains.com.

Lydomains.com is taking steps to ensure that your valuable intellectual property as well as your private data remains secure at all times. Meanwhile, this matter has been reported to the appropriate internet authority to investigate and resolve.

For your information the original nic.ly website can still be viewed at www.noc.ly.

Should you have any concerns about this then please write to info@lydomains.com

Lydomains.com administrator

Okay, clearly something is going on, and I’d love to know what it is.

Update: The Register has a few more details that I missed last Friday. As expected, there’s a debate over ownership of the .ly domain. It’s unclear exactly what is going on today, though.