The past week has been a busy one for The Pirate Bay’s IT department, with the site skipping from domain to domain every other day.
After pressure from anti-piracy group BREIN the notorious BitTorrent site first lost its .SX domain. In a response The Pirate Bay moved to Ascension Island’s .AC ccTLD, and facing another suspension it switched to Peru’s .PE domain a few days later.
However, TPB did not receive a warm welcome in Peru either.
The Pirate Bay team has informed TorrentFreak that the .PE domain was suspended a few hours ago, without prior warning. This means that the site had to switch to the fourth domain in a week, and this time it settled for thepiratebay.gy, using the Guyana based .GY ccTLD.
It’s unclear for how long the Co-operative Republic of Guyana will allow the site to use its domain name, but TPB is ready to relocate again if needed.
“We have some 70 domain names left, so eventually we will find one that sticks,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak. “A few domains have been prepared so we can switch over whenever’s needed.”
Through court cases and informal threats the entertainment industries are working hard to render The Pirate Bay unavailable. Despite these efforts the site remains online, and the most recent domain suspensions do not seem to bother the site’s operators too much.
The site’s traffic has dropped approximately 15% in recent days, but The Pirate Bay expects that this will eventually rebound as people find the site’s new home. According to TPB it remains easy to access the site as the old .SE and .ORG domains still redirect to the new domain.
“Just Google for it,” the Pirate Bay team told us.
Google Recommends Thepiratebay.org
Interestingly, Google appears to be tired of all the domain switches and the search engine now simply lists thepiratebay.org as the top result, instead of the newer domains.
According to TPB roughly 10% of all visitors to the site now access it through proxies, which are unaffected by the domain hopping. And even when all domain names and proxies are exhausted, people can directly use the IP-address 194.71.107.80, although that currently doesn’t support logins for security reasons.
As we reported last week, the torrent site eventually hopes to move to a P2P browser model where domain names will be irrelevant. They are currently developing a special BitTorrent-powered application, which lets users store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other websites on their own computers, making it impossible for third parties to block them.
Until then, the domain name Whack-A-Mole is expected to continue.
