THE ONGOING political turmoil in Africa and the Middle East may not seem like it’s having a major effect on day-to-day life in the West – but it turns out that one of the staple tools used in modern social networking could disappear as a result.

The bit.ly service, probably the most popular URL shortening service on Earth, uses Libya’s .ly domain as part of its service – and the government of Muammar Gaddafi, or a new one replacing it, could decide soon to clamp down on its use.

TIME’s Techland blog discusses the prospect of the government clamping down on the use of the .ly name, which costs about US$75 a year to register, with a guest post from web developer Jerry Brito.

Brito suggests that there are two scenarios – other than the status quo – that could unfold in the coming days if the political turmoil ousts Gaddafi’s government.

The ‘good’ scenario is that the government simply shuts down internal access to the internet. This wouldn’t affect the usage of .ly domains from outside Libya, however.

As Bit.ly’s CEO John Borthwick explained on Quora, there are five main .ly name servers, three of which are all of which would have to go offline in order for .ly domains to stop completely working – and with two housed in the US and one in the Netherlands, the chances of all five going down are slim.

‘Good’ and ‘bad’ options

The ‘bad’ scenario, however, is that because the .ly name is owned by a state agency (just as the .ie name is by Ireland, the .uk name by the UK, and so on) it could theoretically decide to seize any domain it wanted to.

As Brito writes, the government last year seized a vb.ly domain from one adult blogger who used it as a private link-shortening service – citing the .ly policy of banning any content “insulting of religion or politics, or be related to gambling and lottery industry or be contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality.”

Given that there is, broadly speaking, no way of checking whether links shortened through bit.ly are what the government would consider appropriate – and given the role of Twitter, where link shorteners are particularly vital, in organising the recent wave of protests – it’s quite possible that the government could wrest back control of bit.ly.

Thankfully, however, this doesn’t mean that previous bit.ly links will stop working: it just means users will need to make a small tweak to get them working. Bit.ly also owns the J.mp service, and the addresses of the two sites are interchangeable.