Vatican Says Hold On With Those .religion TLDs

from the ICANN-has-lots-of-domain-fun dept

ICANN is having one of its regular meetings in Mexico City, the kind where proposals for all the latest and greatest top-level domains get kicked around. But some TLDs you may not be seeing soon are .catholic, or .hindu, or .churchofthefsm, after The Vatican said it didn’t think it was a good idea. Essentially, they don’t like the idea of some registrar or other group being given control of the TLD of a particular religious tradition, with ICANN forced to determine who gets to be the gatekeeper for each particular set of beliefs. It remains to be seen how this will fit in with ICANN’s plans to open up the TLD system, which would let people register nearly any TLD they wanted (assuming they fork over the requisite amount of cash, of course). Throwing the system open would certainly seem to be setting the stage for a huge number of disputes, as companies fight over who should get to own something like .apple. By allowing .religion TLDs, ICANN could be setting things up for holy cyberwars — but if it’s going to open things up, should it be playing censor, or determining who the rightful “owner” of each religion’s TLD should be?

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Comments on “Vatican Says Hold On With Those .religion TLDs”

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13 Comments
John (profile) says:

Never overestimate people

Instead of discussing who should control the “.religion” or “.religious” TLD’s, shouldn’t the admins be discussing how hard this will be for people to spell correctly?

Will porn-squatters pick up the mis-spelled TLD to grab people? And will the Pope take complaints from people who go to http://www.church.relligon and get a hard-core sex site?

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