301working
I think what you do is setup 301works as a URL shortener accreditation board, similar to ICANN in the domain name space. Since shortening isn’t regulated, it would be voluntary, but hopefully twitter clients/users/etc would only use the services that were accredited.
Part of the membership process would be agreeing to data escrow, whether centralized, or an independent but audited escrow service. This is basically what ICANN did with RDE, to mitigate risk if a registrar goes out of business, which, since many people use their registrar for dns/url-forwarding, is really the same issue as with a shortening service.
Back in April, we reached out to several of the leading URL shortening services to suggest a wayback machine-like approach to archiving the mappings of the URLs. The idea was simple. Each week bit.ly and other participating shorteners would bulk upload URL mappings to a separate service — allowing users access to the mappings in case an individual shortener went down.
