Telegram’s shortlink domain is back online after day-long suspension
As noted by technologist Jonah Aragon, the domain was suspended on the same day that the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on a VPN provider called First VPN, which authorities said was used by cybercriminals to launch ransomware attacks. U.S. authorities shut down the site earlier this year.
The Treasury’s sanctions listing for First VPN, published Monday, contains a link to the full web address of the VPN provider’s public group on Telegram using the shortened t.me domain.
It’s likely that the domain registrar suspended Telegram’s entire t.me domain to comply with the new sanctions, rather than restricting the specific web address that links to the Telegram group in the Treasury’s sanctions listing.
We need a better domain system in general. In theory they exist but no one uses those address spaces.
If there wasn't fishing potential and we were on WWW 1.0, it would be interesting if everyone could spin up their own DNS service and say, this is the internet according to me, if you like it use it.
So many advantages that happen to not work with the modern internet. Technically if you do that now that credit cards and data sensitivity exist, you could be accused of facilitating fraud if you replaced google.
But the advantages are that someone couldn't spend $5,000 on a domain to just squat and not use it. Because someone else could convince popular providers they aren't doing anything useful with it and you will, and just have the domain anyway.
And if the feds say telegram can't have t.me. Well fuck them. Anyone can choose to publish their arbitrary mapping of strings to ip addresses. Who are the feds to ban conversations. If you say t.me and I say 178.68.2.15 is that conversation illegal? And so what if we automate that conversation.
There are a few decentralized / crypto based DNS providers such as Namecoin, Handshake and Ethereum Name Service. I haven't done any serious research into the differences or actually created a domain, but it's on the backburner.
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https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/14/telegrams-shortlink-domain-is-back-online-after-day-long-suspension/
We need a better domain system in general. In theory they exist but no one uses those address spaces.
If there wasn't fishing potential and we were on WWW 1.0, it would be interesting if everyone could spin up their own DNS service and say, this is the internet according to me, if you like it use it.
So many advantages that happen to not work with the modern internet. Technically if you do that now that credit cards and data sensitivity exist, you could be accused of facilitating fraud if you replaced google.
But the advantages are that someone couldn't spend $5,000 on a domain to just squat and not use it. Because someone else could convince popular providers they aren't doing anything useful with it and you will, and just have the domain anyway.
And if the feds say telegram can't have t.me. Well fuck them. Anyone can choose to publish their arbitrary mapping of strings to ip addresses. Who are the feds to ban conversations. If you say t.me and I say 178.68.2.15 is that conversation illegal? And so what if we automate that conversation.
There are a few decentralized / crypto based DNS providers such as Namecoin, Handshake and Ethereum Name Service. I haven't done any serious research into the differences or actually created a domain, but it's on the backburner.