The thing is, the premise of the article (new owner of domain can serve whatever they like to existing links) also applies even if a shortener is not used. Tak

The thing is, the premise of the article (new owner of domain can serve whatever they like to existing links) also applies even if a shortener is not used. Take this URL from yahoo news that I just picked out at random: https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-accidentally-breaks-42-000-224545907.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-accidentally-breaks-42-000-... Lets say tomorrow yahoo sells off "yahoo.com" to the highest bidder. The new owner can reply to queries for that url with whatever they like. The only real difference is the URL above has some meaningful text in the title, so if an article on something very different comes up, there's some indication of something wrong. This is vs. gu.com/ABCD having no indicator of anything amiss if a new owner serves different content. But the story really boils down to: when a domain is sold to a new owner, that new owner can change the content for any existing URL's for that domain.