Last year Hot Press reported on the case of Steven Ryan who was refused permission by the Domain Registry of Ireland (IEDR) to register a site called porn.ie. Steven, not one to quit in the face of adversity appealed the decision but received a final “no” last week.
According to the IEDR, website addresses “must not be offensive or contrary to public policy or generally accepted principles of morality” but their remit does “not encompass the content that appears on .ie websites, the policies simply relate to the domain name itself.”Basically this means that IEDR can only rule on a name – for example if you wanted to call your site deathtoannesexton.ie they could decide that the name in itself was contrary to our generally accepted ideas of what’s right or wrong. Thanks IEDR! That’s fair enough, but this hardly applies to ‘porn’ as a word.Ryan then decided to apply for a site called pornography.ie. The term ‘pornography’ appears in any standard dictionary, does not incite hatred and is a term used by both those who are for or against explicit material.After over a year of legal arguments and appeals, the IEDR has stuck to its guns. According to Ryan, the IEDR seems to have interpreted “public policy” in the widest possible sense. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this seems to mean that the IEDR is now one of our official guardians of morality.Damn – bring back the church I say. Back in the bad old days at least we had public figures to rally against.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 1:09 pm and is filed under porn sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.