Saudi Arabia Objects To Proposed .gay gTLD, Among Others
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."
Interesting the .gay thing, considering how infamous Saudi Party Boys are...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
to their treatment of Jews and women, so they can kiss my ass.
Why don't the simply censor those domains? They already censor the hell of the internet anyway.
I find religion contrary to my morality.
.fuckyousaudiarabia
As an Anarcho-Syndiclist I object to organizations and companies so I respectful request that be remove the .org and .com TLDs.
I'm continually amazed that people think that because something offends THEM, that they have the right to censor what other people can do/see/say/hear/view/etc. There are a few things that the world DOES agree on - such as kiddie porn and murder being bad - but beyond that, if you're offended then simply censor YOURSELF and don't visit those sites! If the whole country agrees (which I doubt!), then block it in your country.
If ICANN doesn't tell them to go take a flying leap, there should be rebellion.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Saudi Arabia refuses to allow for a .gay domain
People continue to put oil from that country in their cars.
Chick-Fil-A founder says he personally believes marriage is between a man and a woman
Gets boycotted.
sudo make me a sandwich
...it would be for "control" of the Internet to be taken away from the evil Americans and given to the saintly UN where rational, tolerant governments such as that of Saudi Arabia have influence?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Exactly my thought. Wouldn't this make it EASIER for them?
What are they bitching about? Its a boat load easier to block entire TL domains in their DNS servers than to block a gazillion .coms all over the world.
Sure the wise will change to some other DNS server, and they may have to block IPs, but so what? They already have that problem. I suspect they also block out of country dns servers.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
and then bomb their fucking stuck-up, 15th century asses into the ground
Yeah, that'll show 'em what civilized behavior looks like!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Saudi view themselves as the leaders of the Islamic faith (sort of like if Italy took the lead on all things catholic that the pope said, good ideas or not).
To them the notion that some of these concepts could even be considered acceptable, anywhere, is outrageous, and true moral leadership is to object vigorously to all of it. They know they'll probably lose, and they probably want to lose (and I'm sure the US embassy was consulted in advance as to whether or not they had any chance of actually getting their opinions followed). But as the stewards of the islamic faith they must at all times appear to object to things contrary to the brand of islam they are promoting.
The idea that these behaviours (consumption of alcohol, sex for fun, homosexuality etc.) could be exposed to any of the islamic faith, especially their poorer brethren, who rely on the Kingdom for guidance and support on these issues, means they must show their leadership to the world and demand such unislamic activites be discouraged at all time. It would be equally terrible if a member of the Islamic faith outside of a Islamic society were to be corrupted by these ideas, especially as a young, impressionable boy or girl in the US or Europe, and the international community should at all times work to protect them from unislamic influences, everywhere.
It's stupid, they know it's stupid, you know it's stupid, but the poor illiterate bastard in Bangladesh or Afghanistan or Morocco or the like can get outraged over it and they don't know it's theatre for their benefit, the saudi's can claim to be defenders of the islamic faith (which wins them points with the literate crazies) and it's unlikely to go very far anyway, so no harm done.
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.
Democrat delenda est
Um, nevermind, it's too late for them to do that with a straight face.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley