Vatican.xxx not a porn site, Holy See happy to find

By Gabe LaMonica, CNN

(CNN) - The Internet is the grapevine. A Vatican spokesman's comments on radio this week led news organizations to report that the Vatican had lost its bid for Vatican.xxx, a coupling of the Vatican and the ".xxx" extension now reserved for pornographic content.

"This domain is not available because it has been acquired by someone else, but not the Vatican," the Rev. Federico Lombardi said on Vatican radio.

But that turns out not to be the case. On the contrary, the domain is reserved specifically for no one.

"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, the company operating the new dot-triple-X domain as a voluntary option for pornographic sites.

"No one is able to purchase that name," she said.

Hijacking names for websites is an all-too-common practice.

For example, "the Democrats own Newtgingrich.com," said the Rev. Tom Reese, referring to a site that redirects, in one instance, to an article titled, "Gingrich 'Inadvertently' Names Porn Company 'Entrepreneur of the Year' For Stimulating the Economy."

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Schoolchildren searching for whitehouse.com on the internet found porn in the late 1990s, and "the bottom line is it's almost impossible to protect yourself from this kind of stuff," said Reese, a Jesuit at Georgetown University.

"There are too many possible domain names," he said.

"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," he said.

The ICM Registry developed the dot-triple-X domain to provide a compromise between those who wish to provide access to pornographic material and those who wish to prevent access to it.

The Vatican.xxx rumor, originally reported by Reuters, brought to light the fact that the market is policing itself.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, "required ICM to work with a governmental advisory committee, and countries from around the world were invited to submit a list of names on the reserve list - from political leaders to singers," Johnson said. "Something like the Vatican would obviously be seen as socially sensitive."

Johnson surmises that people at the Vatican got the wrong idea when someone checked for Vatican.xxx and saw "it was reserved by ICM registry."

"They probably didn't realize there was a list of names that had been blocked," she said, "and if perhaps no one among the team there registered it or had done it themselves, then perhaps they thought that it was done by someone else."

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Bishops, welcomed ICM's action.

"It is showing that people are taking responsibility in recognizing that anything can be used for ill as well as for good," she said, "and you have to take precautions that our technology is not used for ill."

"Even a Jesuit can make mistakes," said Reese, referring to the Vatican spokesman.