VATICAN CITY (RNS) Establishing Internet domain names based on religion would lead to “bitter disputes” among churches, the Vatican has warned.
Domain names that refer to religion, such as “.catholic, .anglican, .orthodox, .hindu, .islam; .muslim, .buddhist, etc. … could provoke competing claims among theological and religious traditions,” wrote Msgr. Carlo Maria Polvani, a Vatican diplomat, in a Feb. 20 statement to the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit entity responsible for the Internet’s naming system.
Such disputes “would force ICANN, implicitly and/or explicitly, to abandon its wise policy of neutrality by recognizing to a particular group or to a specific organization the legitimacy to represent a given religious tradition,” Polvani wrote.
At a March 1-6 meeting in Mexico City, ICANN officials discussed proposals to expand the ranks of so-called generic top-level domains, which currently number about 30.
The Vatican has held its own so-called country domain (.va) since 1995.