The 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.