Steve Ryan has been trying to register the names porn.ie and pornography.ie for nearly 4 years. His requests were always turned down by IEDR (the .ie registry). They say they won’t register those names because they are offensive. Ryan didn’t agree on this. He and his lawyer wrote several letters, in which he referred to the fact that these words are marked as offensive by the Oxford Dictionary (contrary to some other terms) and many parliamentary debates and laws in which the words porn and pornography are mentioned. However IEDR didn’t answer to those letters.
Therefore Ryan decided to go to court. The appeals court agreed the IEDR was wrong in stating the words porn and pornography are offensive. However Ryan doesn’t have a reason to be happy because the court agreed with IEDR’s refusal of registering the domain names. The court said that IEDR is the only body that administers the public resource that is the .ie Internet domain and can be considered as a sort of arbiter of public policy. ‘Some people may find the terms porn and pornography are offensive,’ judged the court ‘and therefore IEDR doesn’t need to register those names.’
Ryan is disappointed and doesn’t understand why the court gives IEDR the final say on what’s offensive and immoral. ‘So if you want to register an .ie domain name, your success depends on the will of IEDR,’ says Ryan.
In other countries these terms are also often mentioned as offensive. For instance, in Luxembourg it wasn’t possible to register a domain name that could be associated with porn or sex until 2001. Now you can apply for such a nae but only if the exact same name hasn’t been blocked before 2001. Names that have been blocked, remain blocked. One example of such an isolated name is porn.lu.