NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Religion, Link Shortening, and Google
Religion, Link Shortening, and Google
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000766.html
Greetings. Link shortening services have always been controversial to
one extent or another. By injecting a third party into user
interactions with Web sites, questions of reliability and privacy are
frequently raised. And now, questions of religion have joined the
fray, and Google has been drawn somewhat indirectly into the
controversy as well.
Reliability is a factor since the failure -- or disappearance -- of a
link shortening service would on its face appear to trigger the
immediate uselessness of all links that have mapped through the
associated shortening service throughout the service's lifetime.
Privacy questions enter the mix since the shortening service is
typically in a position to capture significant information regarding
the source and destination of the transaction, in the course of
forwarding a user click to that ultimate destination.
Yet it is undeniable that link shortening provides important benefits,
especially when dealing with email and other media where long links
are ugly, inconvenient, or actually will not function properly.
I use link shortening extensively and routinely in my own email, where
experience has taught me that long URLs cause a variety of problems
for various recipients of my mailing lists, both due to MTA (Message
Transport Agent) and MUA (Mail User Agent) issues. I get asked about
this frequently enough that I have a chunk of boilerplate text I
typically send in response. I sometimes joke that I see URLs that are
so long that you can practically read the contents of the entire Web
page from the URL itself without clicking through.
Long URLs can cause a real mess in email -- and including them along
with a shortened version can cause the same problems as including them
alone. In Web pages themselves, long links are much less problematic,
and use of shortened links within such pages suggests primarily an
interest in gathering click statistics on the part of the page
author -- a practice that some observers condemn, but that I feel can be
quite acceptable given appropriate privacy policies.
It would have seemed bizarre even a few weeks ago to suggest that
religion would play a role in link shortening, but the Net is all
abuzz about the disconnection of an adult-oriented link shortening
service using the .ly (Libya) top level domain (TLD), due to the
perceived impropriety of the service in the opinion of the associated
TLD registry, essentially on religious grounds.
While fundamentally this sort of situation actually points to the
increasingly dysfunctional nature of the Domain Name System itself,
the more immediate side-effect of this action by the .ly registry has
been to call into question the future stability of the extremely
popular bit.ly link shortening service (to this point my choice for
most link shortening).
Could the same thing happen to bit.ly that happened to the
adult-oriented link shortening service? In the short term, the answer
would appear to be no. The latter was explicitly aimed at adult
sites, while bit.ly is a general purpose shortener with official Terms
of Service that would seem to provide it considerable cover in this
respect.
Also, bit.ly is actually an entire family of domains. There's bit.ly
of course, but also j.mp, and a whole slew of "custom" domains that
you may have seen such as nyti.ms, gizmo.do, wapo.st -- and
innumerable others that are run by bit.ly and are actually
interchangeable with bit.ly URLs (that is, you'll reach the same page
with gizmo.do/foobar as you will with bit.ly/foobar). Obviously, many
of these are related to statistics gathering and "vanity" addresses --
but note that virtually all depend on TLDs that are controlled by one
or another non-U.S. countries, just like bit.ly itself.
Even Google's excellent goo.gl shortening service, which has very
recently been opened up for general link shortening use by the world,
is based on the TLD controlled by -- can you guess? -- Greenland.
The upshot of all this is that -- at least as long as we're saddled
with the current domain name environment -- international registries
and potentially their domestic government policies will be an integral
part of most popular link shortening services.
In the wake of the recent moves by .ly, some observers have suggested
that bit.ly (that's bit.ly proper, presumably not the various other
bit.ly-controlled domain names not in the .ly TLD) should be viewed as
unstable.
This may or may not be true in the long run, but tends to beg the
question of how best to protect the reliability of shortened links
against all manner of possible disruptions, including the potential
for changes not only associated with international conditions and
domestic governments, but also potential changes in business
conditions and business operations on the part of link shortening
services themselves.
To address this, almost a year ago the Internet Archive created
301works.org ( http://www.301works.org ) as an independent
location for the "escrowing" of shortened link mappings, as protection
against the disruption of any individual link shortening service.
(Why "301" you ask? The Web HTTP status code for "Moved Permanently"
is -- ta dah! -- 301.)
In fact, bit.ly is a founding member of 301works.org, and bit.ly's
policy of escrowing their links is a major reason why I've been using
them for my own link shortening ( http://bit.ly/2lGSjj [bit.ly blog] ).
It is both appropriate and desirable for every significant link
shortening service to escrow their shortened links with 301works -- or
some similar third party -- on a routine basis. To do so doesn't
suggest that anyone expects the shortening service (or its "parent"
firm) to vanish anytime soon. But having a copy of the link mappings
in the hands of a trustworthy, independent third party makes enormous
sense on general principles, and shows a willingness to put
reliability -- even if the chances of disruptions seem vanishingly
small -- above proprietary data principles.
I've urged Google on several occasions to consider escrowing their
goo.gl links -- ideally with Internet Archive's 301works. There has
apparently been some interest at Google in this suggestion, but no
definitive movement to actually escrow those links (as far as I know).
Given that link shortening reliability is back in the spotlight, and
goo.gl has now opened up for routine and broad use, I'm again renewing
my call on Google to take proactive steps to protect their goo.gl link
mappings through a third party. It's just the right thing to do.
Link shortening services possess various qualities of the proverbial
double-edged sword -- both positive and negative aspects. They are
extremely useful when used appropriately, but can be abused. And
their reliability over time -- potentially very long spans of time --
is naturally of great concern, since if link mappings are lost, the
value of vast numbers of pages will be decimated.
That's, uh, the long and the short of it.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com)
http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
Co-Founder, PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility): http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad (Network Neutrality Squad): http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP (Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance):
http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Google Buzz: http://bit.ly/lauren-buzz