GAC pipes up on MAPO with silly claim that absence of controversy on Internet leads to security....

[Andrew A. Adams]

> At 11:54 AM +0900 8/9/10, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
> >Avri Doria wrote:
> >> Hmmm, wonder how an application for .omg would do?
> >
> >I could definitely see the commercial possibilities in .rtfm and .wtf tlds as
> >well :-).
>
>
> The first is blasphemy, and the other two are profane.  Not a chance.  :-)

Profanity is in the mind of the hearer (blasphemy, too, IMAO), which of
course brings us back to the topic of how anything, but particularly short
sequences of letters, can be regarded as globally unacceptable. I'm reminded
of the early days of networks (the Internet and walled gardens) when one of
the walled-gardens had a profanity-filter but also had a significant
Veitnamese user base. At the time, pre-Unicode, an ASCII encoding system for
Vietnamese characters used two ASCII characters for each Vietnamese letter,
two of the most common of which were IT and SH, providing obvious problems.
Both RTFM aND WTF can obviously stand for very different things in other
languages than English and might be as important as COM, ORG, EDU or similar
in those languages.

Even in English, the World Taekwondo Federation has www.wtf.org registered.
RTFM.com exists but does stand for the usual hacker jargon, while www.wtf.com
is a "rant" site so stands for the well-known phrase.

I think the boat has sailed on any of these things in existing TLDs so why is
anyone even considering trying to tie down new gTLDs any more than the
existing system is?


--
Professor Andrew A Adams       aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan