Just posted this comment to Joshua Schachter’s post on url shorteners:
There’s nothing in the law to prevent the owners of any of these shorteners to sell their domain to the highest bidder. Neither is there anything to prevent them from lapsing on their domain registration. Do you know when your favorite URL shortener’s registration expires?
It doesn’t really matter if no new links are created through the domain, btw. In the past five days I’ve gotten over two hundred spam attempts to URLs that haven’t existed on my domain since early 2006.
Economics and entropy dictate that most of these domains will fall into spammer hands eventually.
Andrew Grumet's Weblog 