Friday, November 15, 2013

Vatican lays down rules for new .catholic web domain

Bloggers to be disappointedThe Vatican has secured the use of the new Internet domain name '.catholic,' but bloggers hoping that platform could ramp up their own digital pulpit will be disappointed. 

The Holy See says it’ll be reserved for church-related organisations, not individuals.

The new rules on how to assign rights to the '.catholic' domain name are part of the larger issue of how to adapt a tradition-bound, 2,000-year-old institution to the fast-paced digital present.

Case in point: As the parameters of the new domain name were being set, Ivano Dionigi, President of the Vatican’s Latin Academy, said Friday he was still debating how to say 'Twitter' in Latin.

Pope Francis tweets in eight languages, and his Latin feed is surprisingly popular — it has more followers than the native languages of the previous two popes, German and Polish. 

But there is still no consensus on how to refer to the medium in the church’s official language, Dionigi said.

National top-level Internet domains, such as '.it' for Italy or '.ca' for Canada or '.mx' for Mexico, are usually limited to sites based in those countries, and so the Vatican’s '.va' domain is necessarily restricted because it can be used only for sites that originate from within the 110 acres of the tiny city-state.