The Vatican Makes a Bid for Top-Level Domain Status

The Catholic Church is sometimes accused of being out of touch, but there’s one area where it’s on the cutting edge. Among the nearly 2,000 requested new generic top-level domains revealed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Wednesday is .catholic, requested by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, the Vatican’s media arm.

If approved, the new gTLDs, applied for by cities, corporations and other entities, will join the familiar cadre of .com, .org, .edu and .gov at the end of Web addresses.

The Catholic Church’s unified voice -- and pocketbook -- may have been an advantage. There were no applications for .protestant, .lutheran, .baptist or .anglican. Nor were there any applicants for .jewish, .hindu or .buddhist.

There was one application for .islam from a Turkish company that also applied for .halal.

IRI Domain Management, LLC applied for .mormon and .lds referring to the Church of Latter Day Saints.

The blog Religion Clause has a full rundown of religious connections among the applied for gTLDs. Also check out this USA Today piece on the LifeChurch.tv megachurch, one of two applicants for the .church domain.

Incidentally, ICANN’s domain list may be the only place where .church comes right before .cialis, applied for by pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly and Co.

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Joseph Marks

Joseph Marks covers government technology issues, social media, Gov 2.0 and global Internet freedom for Nextgov. He previously reported on federal litigation and legal policy for Law360 and on local, state and regional issues for two Midwestern newspapers. He also interned for Congressional Quarterly’s Homeland Security section and the Associated Press’s Jerusalem Bureau. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s in international affairs from Georgetown.

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