The whole Uganda tiny url thing very much bothers me
It is literally unthinkable that at the height of Apartheid the publisher of a liberal newspaper would have advocated buying ink from South Africa. Yet here we had the administrator of a liberal website advocating and implementing a scheme where we directly benefited the government of Uganda so we could have tiny url's.
As much as it might feel good for us to blame Skinner and only Skinner for this, the fact is Uganda's deathly treatment of gays isn't nearly the cause celeb that Apartheid was in the 1980's. This reminds me of when I told some friends of mine is Mississippi that I was gay but didn't want the wider public to know since I could be fired. These were recent graduates from great colleges and literally all of them thought, in 1995, that it was against federal law to fire gays. The fact is we haven't educated the public enough about Uganda if even the admin of a liberal site was willing to deal with this government for the sake of a convenience feature.
The fact that in the end we got a good result shouldn't make us complacent about the fact that even among liberals Uganda has yet to become the international pariah that it should be. The fact is Uganda should be considered today every bit as evil as South Africa was in the mid and late 1980's. It should be absolutely unthinkable for any person running a liberal website to make deals with Uganda, the fact it apparently isn't, should worry us all.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I have not seen anything beyond saying he will find a different alternative, and disabling the URL shortening function. ("We are going to choose something else. When Elad gets online later today, I will ask him to disable the URL shortening function."
Communicating to the government of Uganda about why there is no traffic through that TLD would be a different matter, and might do some good (but see below - DU is still actually using it). Hosting a message on those links for anyone who lands there, describing why the TLD is not being used by DU would be even better.
Merely shoving them in the back of the closet so they are not as visible doesn't send a message, or accomplish anything other than getting us off his back. So, no, unless he has done more than just disable the URL shortening function in the tweet link, it isn't a big deal.
And, Skinner has not even really shoved them in the back of the closet - Five days later, http://dem.ug still takes you to DU. (He did disable the tweet-shortener, and edit the initial message, but as near as I can tell that is all he has done.)
There's a heckuva lot of history that goes into how domain names came to be in the first place. The Internet grew out of ARPANet. The briefest thumbnail is that the US used to control domain names. When the rest of the world began to come online other countries wanted more control of the types of domain names they could create and more control over DNS service. The IANA came into being, then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANNhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN" target="_blank">ICANN. ICANN charges a (rather steep) fee for creating and implementing a domain name mapping.
It used to be there were only a few top-level domains: .com, .net, .gov, and .org. It got more difficult to come up with new unique names (second-level, like "democraticunderground" as the field got crowded. Eventually, each country got its own unique top-level domain (.us, .ca, .mx, .tv). That opened the floodgates for a lot more unique and interesting second-level domains. Interestingly, the tiny island Tuvalu makes a small profit from the sale of its .tv TLD's. (Nope, .tv doesn't stand for "television" -- it stands for Tuvalu.) Thus, Uganda would make its share from the sale of .ug TLD's.
There is a LOT more to the story, but this encapsulates the barest gist of it.
I suppose change is inevitable - let's hope we attract and retain valuable GLBT members here, going forward. 
