Helmed by sex writer Violet Blue and partner Ben Metcalfe, the team said all of the old links are still available and none were lost. “When Libyan Spider unplugged the domain they took over 500,000 links off the Internet. This damage has been undone,” Blue said in her blog.
According to Metcalfe, Libya had no intention of ever releasing the vb.ly domain, spurring the duo to take corrective action. The new .us domain is now registered and hosted on servers in the U.S. and ensures that the service completely resides under U.S. jurisdiction and benefits from full 1st Amendment rights.
“We had originally pursued a number of other two-letter options (eg xx.yy) to relaunch the service under. However, given what has happened with Libya and the .ly space we decided to avoid any ccTLD that has regulations that were unclear or open to interpretation," Metcalfe blogged.
He added, "Ultimately, we don’t want what happened with Libya happening again to the service’s users, so for the stability and assurance of the service going forward we elected to register a .us domain."
The site owner explained that the vbly.us domain lets users easily modify existing URLs to work with the new domain. For example, "https://vb.ly/yoururl" becomes "https://vbly.us/yoururl" and will work as before.
“I’m sorry to all the users of the service who were let down by what had happened. With the .us registration we do not expect this to happen again,” Metcalfe said.