Monday, October 21, 2013

The Church gets dotCatholic

At the blog God and the Machine, the implications of the domain .catholic going to the Vatican is discussed:

"It means that .catholic in all Latin and foreign characters (Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, etc) will be under the control of the PCCS, which will use them solely for official church institutions, diocese, and religious orders. That eliminates the problem of stblogs.catholic flying under the flag of the Good Ship Vatican without any oversight, but it does raise other questions.

The purpose of .catholic is to give the Church its own internet footprint. The effect of its official status, however, will be to convey a kind of de facto imprimatur on that site’s content. If .catholic is official, the thinking may go, then all that appears on a .catholic site may appear to be “approved.” I doubt the PCCS–or anybody–will be capable of drilling down through every potential .catholic site to make sure it’s clean of false material, which will likely limit the extent of .catholic. Will LCWR get a LCWR.catholic? That could be … problematic"

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