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

Many individuals and societies will find this string offensive and contrary to general standards of public morality. Swearing and the use of other profanities, particularly those of a sexual nature, are regulated in many countries to protect citizens' sensibilities and to protect children.

Watershed restrictions in television are in use around the world because governments and regulatory bodies have recognised the capacity of profane language to cause offence and the threat that exposure to such language poses to children. Such terms are capable of causing universal offence but it is important to recognise that such language is particularly reprehensible to those belonging to certain religions and cultures.

Although television scheduling provides some safeguards to protect certain groups from offensive language, the world wide web is by contrast unregulated. The proposed threads would increase the prevalence of offensive language on the world wide web and, in turn, the general public's, including children's, exposure to profanities.

Additionally, 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 .SUCKS as this would be disruptive to their business. Instead, they would likely purchase a new domain name in .SUCKS and maintain their other domain names, but also host their websites on the new domain.

Therefore, we respectfully request that ICANN not award this gTLD string.

Sources/references:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt

http://www.w3.org/2004/03/28-tld

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD

http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/NNBCKV.pdf