Libya's protests have raged for a week, and the country is on the brink of an even more violent confrontation between anti-government demonstrators and hired mercenaries commanded by Colonel Gaddafi. The whole world is watching and wondering: How will this affect Bit.ly, the URL-shortening service everyone uses on Twitter?

It might be the 1,000th-least important thing about the Libyan protests—but that is not going to keep people from worrying about it. See, Bit.ly uses the ".ly" top-level domain controlled by Libya, and the Libyan government has the final say in what's allowed to use the .ly domain. Time speculates that if Gaddafi is overthrown, a new government could place stricter restrictions on .ly, "and in so doing create headaches not only for the bit.ly and Twitter (which uses bit.ly as its default link-shortening service), but also for sites such as Trunk.ly, Letter.ly, Embed.ly, Graphic.ly."

Dear God... Not Trunk.ly, whatever that is! Send in the Marines! It's amazing that Obama didn't even allude to the number of shortened links that are in jeopardy during his speech today about Libya. Maybe he's going to do a whole one just about Bit.ly tomorrow.