You won’t find porn on Vatican.xxx
Posted by Adriana Tayraco on Thu, Dec 29, 2011
Just in time for Christmas, a nasty rumour started spreading indicating that the site vatican.xxx had been purchased by someone not belonging to the religious organization. A spokesperson commented on Vatican radio that they had tried to purchase the domain but that someone had beat them to it. Chaos ensued as the press had a field day speculating on what the content of the new site would be.
As it turned out, Vatican.xxx was not purchased by a naughty cybersquatter but, on the contrary, it had already been permanently reserved by the ICM and no one is able to purchase it. "Vatican.xxx is a name that is on the permanent reserve list, so it was pulled out of the registry before the launch," said Jocelyn Johnson, a representative for ICM Registry. It is probable that someone did not realize that there was a list of names that had been blocked from the beginning and they assumed someone else had already gotten a hold of the domain.
While they may have dodged one bullet, no one’s to say that there isn’t another Vatican-related adult site in the works right now. There are infinite possibilities when it comes to creating domain names. Tom Reese, a Jesuit at Georgetown University stated; "Vatican girls.xxx, Vatican sluts.xxx, it's almost infinite - to say nothing of all the obscene words you can put together and all the words not only after but before Vatican. It's just an impossible task to defend yourself from this kind of stuff".
It goes on to show that no one – not even religious institutions or figures – are safe from possible cybersquatting or domain name hijacking. We sure hope that the Vatican embraces social media monitoring now that they are expanding on Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and even the Pope himself is tweeting.
To find out more about ICANN’s new .XXX initiative, click here for more blog posts and follow us at @BDBrandprotect for up to date news and information.