⚔️ Is the War in Guyana going to Kill My URL Shortener?

In a recent fit of failed-state arrogance, Venezuela has declared war on neighboring Guyana, aiming to seize about two thirds of Guyanan soil. The stated argument is that a land treaty in 1899 was invalid, the real reason might be that Guyana discovered holy spitballs level of crude oil in its national waters — but there are not just retro-state levels of wealth at stake, but also minuscule amounts of indie SAAS developer money.

Yes, I fear that this war threatens my link shortening business. How? Let me back up.

Six months ago, I set out to build a link shortener. I needed to use one for my main business getwaitlist.com, and thought there's a good opportunity to just do the whole thing myself. It was super important to me to get a one-character domain and make it as short as possible. After a long adventure of wrangling domain frauds, I bought y.gy

The next thing I learned was that not all country domains are created equal, and especially not the short ones. For whatever reason, a lot of registrars like Namecheap, Google Domains, Dynadot and others didn't support the .gy extension. There were other registrars, like GoDaddy, that did support the .gy extension — but not one character long! The shortest domains they'd support were three characters. Why? Who knows.

The process of transferring the domain was chaotic. The .gy domain is administrated the university of Guyana. They have a nice website hosted on Wordpress, if you want to learn more about them. Apparently, a month before I bought the domain, they changed one of their fee policies, and so the previous owner hadn't paid some fee, and even though I had bought the domain, it was expired, so in the nick of time during the grace period I had to wire $700 to… somebody? Working through Gandhi.net customer support over many weeks, eventually a dutiful employee at the .gy registry restored access. Hooray!

This was my first practical interaction with a domain registry. For .com and stuff, it's so well-oiled that the presence of verisign is invisible. But Guyana is not invisible. When I bought the domain, I didn't even know where Guyana was. There are like 5 Guineas: Equatorial Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Papua New Guinea, Guyana, and, of course, Guinea. At first I thought I had bought the one in West Africa, then I learned it was in South America.

And now it's under attack. The whole registry is in the university of Guyana, in Georgetown, Guyana. This is where Georgetown is:

And the disputed territory is in orange. Yes, if the Venezuelans get their way, the capital of Guyana is just a stone's throw away from the new border. I can't imagine a scenario in which this doesn't end with that city getting taken over, too. If you're in the business of extrajudicially seizing territory, and you're already taking three quarters of the country, and the capital is literally just another five miles away, well, you're just going to take the whole thing.

My first thought is of course with the innocent people of Guyana, whose sovereignty and lives are being threatened by murderous criminal and shit-tier public servant Nicolas Maduro.

My second thought is: well, if Venezuela just takes over all of Guyana, what the hell happens to the .gy domain?

There are two classes of concern here:

First, what happens if the fighting spreads to Georgetown and, let's say, the IT department catches fire? Or Nicolas Maduro himself seizes the NICGY and has one of his lackeys mess with the DNS configuration? Short of moving all the physical equipment and setting it up again elsewhere, ICANN in their wise anticipation has the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator system , by which domain registries that are unable to serve their functions -- like due to getting hit by a 1960s soviet missile. And that would probably hold us over, and I am not aware of there being any policy on when it expires.

But more seriously, what happens if Guyana were to be totally seized by Venezuela? There's actually no precedent for this. In the 21st century, full-on I'm-taking-your-stuff-style territory disputes are desperately uncool and vigorously frowned upon.

There are a few cases of disputed territory leading to disputed domains:

The world has never experienced one country taking over another country's ability to administer a domain. And there have been no domains where the administrating country has ceased to be. If the bandits take over — does .gy just cease to be? ICANN delists it? What happens? It turns out the wise people of ICANN actually have planned ahead, with a policy here, on the Principles and Guidelines for the Delegation and Administration of CCTLDs

Key relevant principles of ICANN's policy are:

So just nuking the TLD if the country gets taken over is probably out of the question. And reading between the lines of points 1 and 3, in practice ICANN is probably going to just go by whatever the UN says. Would the UN recognize the national sovereignty of the Guyanan people, even if they're being extrajudicially administered by some jackbooted thug? Well, yeah, I think they would. Maybe there would be like a Guyanan government in exile, and thereby administration of the GY domain, in exile.

Thankfully for us, the Guyanan government is very liberal in its permissiveness of use of the .gy domain. Anyone gets to. Imagine how tricky it would be if it were like the .us domain, where you have to be a US person: imagine that you're like a Venezuelan or Guayanan guy intending to register your .gy domain and then there's a whole dispute over whether you are a GY person or not, but I suppose such inconveniences are the ripple-effect minor consequences of a major international crime by a dude who looks like Stalin.

Anyway, where this brings me is that the war probably won't kill my link shortener. The war itself is obviously idiotic and wildly impractical — the territory at stake, the Esequibo region, is entirely forested and mountainous with basically no roads — they're sure as hell not going to bring their convoys through neighboring Brazil to get there, and after decades of robbery by communist dictators, they're just way too goddamn poor to credibly fly their soviet-era rusty airforce over there. So it's unlikely that anything will actually happen. And even if it does, it looks like the good folks at ICANN have our backs. My only remaining action to defend my Guyanese interests, and what is morally right, is that I will be writing to my congressman and senator to express that the United States should forcefully support the sovereignty of the state of Guyana.