Who runs .ly?

29th July 2004

Libya’s top level domain .LY is in a state of limbo after a fierce dispute about its ownership. Two organizations are arguing that the .ly is theirs! Lydomains.com and nic.ly both have claimed responsibility of .ly.

The battle began on April 9, when all the estimated 12,500 Libyan domains went offline for four days and nobody knew why.

Lydomains.com, a Macclesfield UK based company and client of Magic Moments company, is represented by a Libyan Khalil Luheshi. Lydomains.com says the domain belongs to them. While nic.ly (Network Information Center of Libya) is based in Tripoli, and managed by Dr Hosni Tayeb has another thing to say.

IANA, the internet body that decides who runs ccTLDs could not decide who is in charge of the .ly. Dr Tayeb provided a potted history of Libya's Internet when he applied to the international group Centr for membership. Alshaeen for Information Technology was given control over the TLD in April 1997. Two years later, in September 1999, it went live. Dr Tayeb says he was a member of Alsaheen's board.

According to Dr Tayeb, he set up the Alfoursan International Company with a Tripoli headquarters in 2000. He is both president and CEO. On 24 February 2000, Alsaheen and Alfoursan became the same company, and control of the Libyan top-level domain moved to Alfoursan.

Dr Tayeb says this change was communicated to and accepted by IANA. However, the IANA record still holds Alsaheen as the owner and recognises Dr Tayeb as only the "caretaker" of the domain. All .ly domains from that point until a week ago were sold through Lydomains.com.

Dr Tayeb claims that he has proof that Alsaheen signed over the domain to Alfoursan and has endeavoured to get the record changed to his company through an IANA redelegation. It is believed - although IANA will not state - that Mr Luheshi disputed the redelegation and so the domain is left in limbo with no one officially owning it.

But Mr Luheshi did have a commercial relationship with the company running the nameserver that the .ly domain was pointed at and so had effective control over the domain. So Dr Tayeb approached Magic Moments to insist it work with him rather than Mr Luheshi.

The administrator of lydomains.com wrote out an email on Thu, 22 Apr 2004 saying “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 none 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.

The administrator went on saying” 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 us.

So where do we stand? It's impossible to tell, and the main affected about this dispute are the .ly registered websites as many sites suffered the four day absence of .ly.

Libya’s mass media website got into a mess when their .ly could not answer reguests. Now they seemingly made up their mind and re-registered the site with another name and another .net extension.

But this is a real dilemma. Webmasters and site developers are exhausted and apparently lost trust of .ly as they fear a second disappearance at any time. The dispute is not fixed yet, and the .ly may go offline without a pre-causation.

I was about to register my new site with .ly when it suddenly disappeared, now I see it is better to register with .com or .net, says one webmaster.

So, the whole situation is so complicated and no one knows what is going on. Two organizations are fighting to own the domain with knowing that their fight will make people lose trust in the domain.

People do not like to buy domains whose owners are not known!

Find this article at: http://www.DomainsMagazine.com/