Saudi Arabia Objects To Proposed .gay gTLD, Among Others
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Qedward writes "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has objected to a variety of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) ranging from .porn and .sexy to .wine and .bar and .bible, according to records of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The organisation said in June it had received 1930 applications for gTLD 'strings,' of which 911 came from North America and 675 from Europe. Saudi Arabia's Communication and Information Technology Commission, the IT and communications regulator, has objected to the .gay string and asked ICANN to refuse the application for the new gTLD. 'Many societies and cultures consider homosexuality to be contrary to their culture, morality or religion,' CITC said. 'The creation of a gTLD string which promotes homosexuality will be offensive to these societies and cultures,' it added."
Re:Irony (Score:4, Interesting)
For a related example, look at all those people who boycott genetically-modified foods, but would suddenly find their objections disappear upon diagnosis of diabeties. The best treatment involves insulin produced by transgenic bacteria. Or the fuss last year when it was emerged that some of the flavorings used in coke-cola and a few other products were tested on human embryonic stem cells - there were a lot of boycotts over that one, but always of food. No-one called for a boycott of drugs, even though practically every medication developed in the last thirty years was developed and tested using the same cell line, HEK 293.
Re:TLDs failed (Score:5, Interesting)
ICANN wants the money too badly to admit failure.
But there is only one sane solution to these international problems. Put everything in the country specific tlds. Then the only international cooperation needed is to ensure we can all find the national roots and divide up the IP space. And IPv6 removes pretty much all controversy over a fight for addresses so problem solved. Yes it would mean a longterm migration of .com, .net, .org and .mil into the .us address space and probably mirroring them into most of the others, at least for a transition period since the sensible behavor for browsers would be to determine the local .cc and append it to everything. But over a decade we could end all this bickering AND the relentless push to turn control over the entire Internet to the U.N.
The idea of Saudi Arabia objecting to the existence of something in someone else's namespace would be laughed at. But if it is a shared namespace they really have as much right to object as the various other factions to support these goofy new top level names.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure why that's modded funny. Bachi Boy parties [bullseyerooster.com] are common in saudi arabia, afghanistan and a variety of other middle eastern countries.
Block expression to make the expressors go away (Score:2, Interesting)
This is just an example of a very common mode of irrational thinking:
"This makes me feel squeamish, so I want it to stop. If we can make the expression of it stop, then people will just stop doing it, and will eventually nobody will ever do it."
It is clearly nonsense when expressed this way, but people who engage in this sort of thinking don't express it this way, they just act on their irrationality and try to control everyone around them.
You really do not understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
Lots of the arab countries do not want to be able to block things like porn or ".gay" material.
No, they do not want it to EXIST. At all. Not there, but not where you are either. So they are not OK with ANYONE having a .gay domain, because they fundamentally think it's wrong to allow this for anyone.
Think about this the next time proposals are made to have the U.N. control domains...