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> The Ismaili Imamat is a supra-national entity, representing the succession of Imams since the time of the Prophet Muhammad. (https://ismaili.imamat/#introduc

> The Ismaili Imamat is a supra-national entity, representing the succession of Imams since the time of the Prophet Muhammad. (https://ismaili.imamat/#introduction https://ismaili.imamat/#introduction) The Aga Khan is the leader of the Ismaili Imamat. They have as good a claim to a TLD as Berlin, if not more.

maxbond 1y ago
There's also .va for the Vatican and .lds for the Mormon faith (and .mormon), and more generic Christian ones like .church. I didn't find any for other religions on a casual search, perhaps because many of them don't have the same degree of centralization.
- mikestorrent 1y ago
  The Vatican is a country, so it gets a ccTLD.
  - maxbond 1y ago
    True but I don't think the distinction matters to the overall point that it's perfectly ordinary for religious institutions to operate a TLD, regardless of the mechanism that allows for it.
    - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
      Vatican City is a theocracy, not a religion. You'd technically have to add .uk and many more to the list if you're broadening to all nations with a state religion.
      - PeterWhittaker 1y ago
        .uk was one of the first! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk (Or did I miss an "/s"?)
        pests 1y ago
        I think they mean in the context of a a TLD related to a religious entity. Since uk has a state religion, they meant “add it to the list of religious tlds” along with .va and others mentioned in this thread.
        PeterWhittaker 1y ago
        Oh, that I got. Just made me laugh, since .uk is one of the oldest CC TLDs.
      - maxbond 1y ago
        It's the central bureaucratic/theocratic function of a major world religion which, it just so happens, is organized as a micronation instead of as a foundation or something like that. The primary function of the UK is not to run the Anglican church, nor is their king generally thought of as their primary leader.
        jkaplowitz 1y ago
        Interestingly, legally, the Holy See and the Vatican City State are not the same thing. The one which is the global seat of the Roman Catholic Church, which has existed since ancient times including for a time without any territory after the Papal States were lost, which is internationally sovereign, and the one to which ambassadors to the "Vatican" are accredited is the Holy See, not the Vatican City State. The one that has .va is Vatican City State, which was created only in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty between the Holy See and the (then-)Kingdom of Italy. That treaty was signed to return a certain degree of independent territorial authority to the Holy See, including the Vatican City State where it has full sovereignty, to give financial compensation to the Church / the Holy See for the loss of the Papal States, and to address a few other matters. Yes, the Vatican City State is under the governance of the Holy See as a sovereign entity, but it's the Holy See that's sovereign, not the Vatican City State - and the Holy See would remain legally intact if the Vatican City State were to be physically conquered by a foreign power. ISO country codes which lead to ccTLD domain names like .va are often given more on the basis of internationally recognized/relevant territorial definition than on the basis of international recognized/relevant sovereignty where those two things diverge. After all, the British Indian Ocean Territory has never itself been sovereign under that name, and Taiwan's international sovereignty is a controversial question, but .io and .tw ccTLDs were still assigned and are universally recognized. it's for the same reason that .va goes with the territory and not with the global church.
  - os2warpman 1y ago
    I don't understand why the Vatican is considered a country, besides as a quirk of history. It is smaller than high school campus nearest my house, is not a UN member, and seems to exist solely as a tax haven. It also has no native citizens. No person has been born in Vatican City in a century and even if you pop out a baby in Vatican City and are you yourself a Vatican City resident and citizen, the baby is not a citizen until made so by legal decree, citizenship which ends the second your employment ends, of course, because citizenship is tied to employment. It doesn't make sense. It isn't a country. It is a tax dodge. My perspective may be skewed. I value "quirky quirks of quirktastic history" very little.
    - franciscop 1y ago
      What is a country for you? How do you define it? Is the land size that important?
      - os2warpman 1y ago
        A country must have a people. Who are the people of the Vatican? The only persons who live there are temporary government employees and not even all of them are citizens because that is optional. You cannot own property, vote for your government, start your own business, go to school, buy anything except what is stocked in the small canteen, or go to the hospital if you are a Vatican citizen and odds are pretty good you live in Italy anyways. Imagine if a bank drew a boundary around its Manhattan skyscraper headquarters and declared itself a country called Bankistan whose only residents were janitors, financial analysts, and management-- and most of its citizens live in Brooklyn. Except for the C-suite and senior vice presidents who live in penthouses and the janitors who live in tiny rooms in the basement. Also the second the bank fires you or you quit or retire, you're no longer a citizen of Bankistan. At a minimum, a capital-see (heh) Country is something that belongs to you if but in a very, insignificantly, small part. So my definition of "country" is ill-defined but does not include the Vatican.
        johnecheck 1y ago
        Your definition ignores international recognition. Ultimately, whether you get to act like a country (go to the UN, engage in diplomacy, hold territory) is in large part based on whether other countries recognize you as such. I don't know that it defines country-hood but it's part of the puzzle. The Vatican is a fascinating example since it's clearly a very different sort of entity than the rest of the countries, yet is still recognized by most of the world's nations.
  - skissane 1y ago
    I am wondering if the Albanian government’s plan to give independence to the Tirana HQ of the Bektashi Sufi Order is ever actually going to happen. If it does, then they’ll be the world’s second country dedicated to a religion… well, currently Iran is a Twelver Shi’a theocracy, but Iran had a long history before it was theocracy, and maybe one day won’t be one anymore; Vatican City and the proposed “Bektashi Muslim Vatican” are countries whose existence is inseparable from being HQ of a religious group. The odd thing about giving the Bektashis a “Muslim Vatican”, is they are a tiny minuscule sect within Islam, and many conservative Muslims will say “they aren’t Muslims at all”
    - riffraff 1y ago
      Tibet was a theocracy with a religious leader for a while until recent times. Also I think the Albanian plan is more on the lines of Mount Athos: it is technically an in independent administration with independent (monastic) government but still part of the Greek state https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monastic_community_of_Mount_Athos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monastic_community_of_Mount_...
      - skissane 1y ago
        > Tibet was a theocracy with a religious leader for a while until recent times. Yes, but it was still like contemporary Iran - a country which happened to have a theocratic system of government, not a country whose sole raison d'être was to endow a religious group with the trappings of statehood. > Also I think the Albanian plan is more on the lines of Mount Athos: it is technically an in independent administration with independent (monastic) government but still part of the Greek state I don’t believe that is true - if you read Albanian PM Edi Rama’s statements on the topic, he always cites the Vatican as his inspiration, not Mount Athos - which makes sense given Rama himself is Catholic, not Orthodox. He isn’t proposing this idea out of any personal belief in Bektashi Islam… a cynic would say he is doing it because it is good PR both for his country and for him personally… he’d surely give more high-minded explanation, in terms of the Albanian state giving a magnanimous gift to the cause of interfaith tolerance and religious moderation… but definitely the model is the Vatican not Mount Athos
- gerikson 1y ago
  .islam is proposed but contested: https://icannwiki.org/.islam https://icannwiki.org/.islam
  - xp84 1y ago
    I struggled to find a non-sarcastic, non-flippant way to say it so I'll just go with factual: I am not surprised that there are entities willing to fight over such an important name.
- dc396 1y ago
  .VA is a country code TLD, assigned because it is listed in ISO-3166. The others are "generic top-level domains" which had to go through ICANN's new gTLD program, which has a lot of rules (338 pages of them for the 2012 round) and costs a lot of money (US$185K to start with recurrent fees dependent upon the number of registrations). I suspect it isn't about centralization, but rather about perceived cost/benefit ratios.
Tamer 1y ago
> ismaili.imamat So, a quite expensive domain hack? Are they trending again? There's even a list on domainhacks.club
int_19h 1y ago
However, "imamat" by itself is a generic term, so it's not clear why it should be controlled by a single organization that happens to have it in the name.
- 627467 1y ago
  Aren't there tons of generic terms gTLD controlled by a single organizations now?
  - jonesjohnson 1y ago
    I've just learned here that .man is owned/controlled by the MAN group edit: source: https://icannwiki.org/.man https://icannwiki.org/.man also: walmart applied for .george https://icannwiki.org/.george https://icannwiki.org/.george
- ccgreg 1y ago
  Given that this discussion was started by someone mentioning only these 3 related things, I'd guess that the motivation might a negative one.
- gerikson 1y ago
  And indeed, the KSA rep has opposed it: https://slate.com/technology/2012/08/icann-top-level-domain-applications-saudi-arabia-apparently-objects-to-catholic-gay-bible.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/08/icann-top-level-domain-...

maxbond 1y ago

There's also .va for the Vatican and .lds for the Mormon faith (and .mormon), and more generic Christian ones like .church. I didn't find any for other religions on a casual search, perhaps because many of them don't have the same degree of centralization.

mikestorrent 1y ago
The Vatican is a country, so it gets a ccTLD.
- maxbond 1y ago
  True but I don't think the distinction matters to the overall point that it's perfectly ordinary for religious institutions to operate a TLD, regardless of the mechanism that allows for it.
  - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    Vatican City is a theocracy, not a religion. You'd technically have to add .uk and many more to the list if you're broadening to all nations with a state religion.
    - PeterWhittaker 1y ago
      .uk was one of the first! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk (Or did I miss an "/s"?)
      - pests 1y ago
        I think they mean in the context of a a TLD related to a religious entity. Since uk has a state religion, they meant “add it to the list of religious tlds” along with .va and others mentioned in this thread.
        PeterWhittaker 1y ago
        Oh, that I got. Just made me laugh, since .uk is one of the oldest CC TLDs.
    - maxbond 1y ago
      It's the central bureaucratic/theocratic function of a major world religion which, it just so happens, is organized as a micronation instead of as a foundation or something like that. The primary function of the UK is not to run the Anglican church, nor is their king generally thought of as their primary leader.
      - jkaplowitz 1y ago
        Interestingly, legally, the Holy See and the Vatican City State are not the same thing. The one which is the global seat of the Roman Catholic Church, which has existed since ancient times including for a time without any territory after the Papal States were lost, which is internationally sovereign, and the one to which ambassadors to the "Vatican" are accredited is the Holy See, not the Vatican City State. The one that has .va is Vatican City State, which was created only in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty between the Holy See and the (then-)Kingdom of Italy. That treaty was signed to return a certain degree of independent territorial authority to the Holy See, including the Vatican City State where it has full sovereignty, to give financial compensation to the Church / the Holy See for the loss of the Papal States, and to address a few other matters. Yes, the Vatican City State is under the governance of the Holy See as a sovereign entity, but it's the Holy See that's sovereign, not the Vatican City State - and the Holy See would remain legally intact if the Vatican City State were to be physically conquered by a foreign power. ISO country codes which lead to ccTLD domain names like .va are often given more on the basis of internationally recognized/relevant territorial definition than on the basis of international recognized/relevant sovereignty where those two things diverge. After all, the British Indian Ocean Territory has never itself been sovereign under that name, and Taiwan's international sovereignty is a controversial question, but .io and .tw ccTLDs were still assigned and are universally recognized. it's for the same reason that .va goes with the territory and not with the global church.
- os2warpman 1y ago
  I don't understand why the Vatican is considered a country, besides as a quirk of history. It is smaller than high school campus nearest my house, is not a UN member, and seems to exist solely as a tax haven. It also has no native citizens. No person has been born in Vatican City in a century and even if you pop out a baby in Vatican City and are you yourself a Vatican City resident and citizen, the baby is not a citizen until made so by legal decree, citizenship which ends the second your employment ends, of course, because citizenship is tied to employment. It doesn't make sense. It isn't a country. It is a tax dodge. My perspective may be skewed. I value "quirky quirks of quirktastic history" very little.
  - franciscop 1y ago
    What is a country for you? How do you define it? Is the land size that important?
    - os2warpman 1y ago
      A country must have a people. Who are the people of the Vatican? The only persons who live there are temporary government employees and not even all of them are citizens because that is optional. You cannot own property, vote for your government, start your own business, go to school, buy anything except what is stocked in the small canteen, or go to the hospital if you are a Vatican citizen and odds are pretty good you live in Italy anyways. Imagine if a bank drew a boundary around its Manhattan skyscraper headquarters and declared itself a country called Bankistan whose only residents were janitors, financial analysts, and management-- and most of its citizens live in Brooklyn. Except for the C-suite and senior vice presidents who live in penthouses and the janitors who live in tiny rooms in the basement. Also the second the bank fires you or you quit or retire, you're no longer a citizen of Bankistan. At a minimum, a capital-see (heh) Country is something that belongs to you if but in a very, insignificantly, small part. So my definition of "country" is ill-defined but does not include the Vatican.
      - johnecheck 1y ago
        Your definition ignores international recognition. Ultimately, whether you get to act like a country (go to the UN, engage in diplomacy, hold territory) is in large part based on whether other countries recognize you as such. I don't know that it defines country-hood but it's part of the puzzle. The Vatican is a fascinating example since it's clearly a very different sort of entity than the rest of the countries, yet is still recognized by most of the world's nations.
- skissane 1y ago
  I am wondering if the Albanian government’s plan to give independence to the Tirana HQ of the Bektashi Sufi Order is ever actually going to happen. If it does, then they’ll be the world’s second country dedicated to a religion… well, currently Iran is a Twelver Shi’a theocracy, but Iran had a long history before it was theocracy, and maybe one day won’t be one anymore; Vatican City and the proposed “Bektashi Muslim Vatican” are countries whose existence is inseparable from being HQ of a religious group. The odd thing about giving the Bektashis a “Muslim Vatican”, is they are a tiny minuscule sect within Islam, and many conservative Muslims will say “they aren’t Muslims at all”
  - riffraff 1y ago
    Tibet was a theocracy with a religious leader for a while until recent times. Also I think the Albanian plan is more on the lines of Mount Athos: it is technically an in independent administration with independent (monastic) government but still part of the Greek state https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monastic_community_of_Mount_Athos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monastic_community_of_Mount_...
    - skissane 1y ago
      > Tibet was a theocracy with a religious leader for a while until recent times. Yes, but it was still like contemporary Iran - a country which happened to have a theocratic system of government, not a country whose sole raison d'être was to endow a religious group with the trappings of statehood. > Also I think the Albanian plan is more on the lines of Mount Athos: it is technically an in independent administration with independent (monastic) government but still part of the Greek state I don’t believe that is true - if you read Albanian PM Edi Rama’s statements on the topic, he always cites the Vatican as his inspiration, not Mount Athos - which makes sense given Rama himself is Catholic, not Orthodox. He isn’t proposing this idea out of any personal belief in Bektashi Islam… a cynic would say he is doing it because it is good PR both for his country and for him personally… he’d surely give more high-minded explanation, in terms of the Albanian state giving a magnanimous gift to the cause of interfaith tolerance and religious moderation… but definitely the model is the Vatican not Mount Athos
gerikson 1y ago
.islam is proposed but contested: https://icannwiki.org/.islam https://icannwiki.org/.islam
- xp84 1y ago
  I struggled to find a non-sarcastic, non-flippant way to say it so I'll just go with factual: I am not surprised that there are entities willing to fight over such an important name.
dc396 1y ago
.VA is a country code TLD, assigned because it is listed in ISO-3166. The others are "generic top-level domains" which had to go through ICANN's new gTLD program, which has a lot of rules (338 pages of them for the 2012 round) and costs a lot of money (US$185K to start with recurrent fees dependent upon the number of registrations). I suspect it isn't about centralization, but rather about perceived cost/benefit ratios.

Tamer 1y ago

> ismaili.imamat So, a quite expensive domain hack? Are they trending again? There's even a list on domainhacks.club

int_19h 1y ago

However, "imamat" by itself is a generic term, so it's not clear why it should be controlled by a single organization that happens to have it in the name.

627467 1y ago
Aren't there tons of generic terms gTLD controlled by a single organizations now?
- jonesjohnson 1y ago
  I've just learned here that .man is owned/controlled by the MAN group edit: source: https://icannwiki.org/.man https://icannwiki.org/.man also: walmart applied for .george https://icannwiki.org/.george https://icannwiki.org/.george
ccgreg 1y ago
Given that this discussion was started by someone mentioning only these 3 related things, I'd guess that the motivation might a negative one.
gerikson 1y ago
And indeed, the KSA rep has opposed it: https://slate.com/technology/2012/08/icann-top-level-domain-applications-saudi-arabia-apparently-objects-to-catholic-gay-bible.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/08/icann-top-level-domain-...