2011 Domain Dunce: Vatican’s domain name misunderstanding
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
The Vatican says someone else bought Vatican.xxx when it was actually reserved by the registry.
Catholics + Porn = headlines.
Even if the information is wrong.
That’s the lesson from recent misinformation from the Vatican about Vatican.xxx and the ensuing news reports about it.
Rev. Federico Lombardi commented on Vatican radio, “This domain is not available because it has been acquired by someone else, but not the Vatican,” according to Reuters.
The domain had not been acquired by someone else. It had been smartly reserved by .xxx registry ICM Registry to prevent someone from registering it.
But the Vatican’s comments went viral until Kevin Murphy, writing for The Register, noted that a simple whois lookup would have dispelled this myth.
I guess Mr. Lombardi isn’t infallible.
Further Reading:
Actually, the story wasn’t broken by the Vatican but rather by someone who raised the issue. When contacted, the Vatican rep responded that they didn’t register the domain, someone else did.
It would have made a great gay porn site.