Application Comment Details

The Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) is the information and communications technology sector (ICT) regulator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (SA).

Amongst its roles and responsibilities include:

• Granting licenses in the ICT sector

• Protection of users’ rights

• Setting service quality standards

• Preparation of policies, regulatory frameworks and studies of ICT sector in SA

• domain name administration in SA

• Increasing the information security awareness level in SA

• Supervision of the National Committee for Information Society in SA

We consider there is a risk that this string is used in the same way as .XXX to host pornographic websites.

Many individuals and societies find this string offensive on religious and/or cultural grounds. We oppose the introduction of this gTLD string on both of these grounds, and because pornography causes huge damage to society's social fabric. Pornography undermines gender equality and threatens public morals by objectifying and exploiting women. The values expressed in pornography clash with the family concept and they undermine the traditional values that promote marriage, family, and children.

Pornography frequently depicts irresponsible behaviour by parties who take no long-term responsibility for their actions. Studies have shown that exposure to pornographic material causes decreased respect for long-term, monogamous relationships, and diminishes the desire for procreation.

There are already thousands of pornographic websites on the internet. Allowing the applied-for string to be registered, can only increase proliferation of pornographic websites and pornographic material that may be accessed on the internet, often without any restriction, by the world's population including, of course, children.

Entities with an established presence in existing domains such as .COM would be unlikely to move all their websites to .DATING as this would be disruptive to their business. Instead, they would likely purchase a new domain name in .DATING and maintain their other domain names, but also host their websites on the new domain.

Therefore, we respectfully request that ICANN refuse the application for this gTLD string.

Sources/references:

.sex Considered Dangerous, IETF RFC 3675, D. Eastlake 3rd, Motorola Laboratories February 2004 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt)

Jacobs, I.: Why Using TLDs for Filtering is Ineffective, Harmful, and Unnecessary Public communication. 2004 (http://www.w3.org/2004/03/28-tld)

Berners-Lee, Tim, New Top Level Domains .mobi and .xxx Considered Harmful, Essay, 2004 (http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD)

Zillmann, Dolf, Report of the Surgeon General's Workshop on Pornography and Public Health: Background Papers: 'Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography', 1986 (http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/NNBCKV.pdf)

(This is the full submission of our comments relating to the use of .DATING as a gTLD.)