Why Feed.Me.Pizza will never exist: Inside the world of government vetoes and the internet

Goodbye, bana.na.club, plus many more weird combinations

The world's governments are revealing their egos and priorities by vetoing short domain names.

After a row between DNS overseer ICANN and nation states, government officials have been given veto rights over two-letter domain names used with dot-word gTLDs.

For example, Italy, which operates .it, doesn't want anyone buying it.pizza from the people who run .pizza. Whoever owns it.pizza could flog third-level domains like eat.it.pizza, and Italy is having none of it.

There's a catch: the countries need to publicly say what they want veto rights over and why. And that has led to some weird and amusing responses.

First out the gate was Spain, which formally objected to the release of 'es.abogado' ('abogado' is Spanish for lawyer). "We request 'es.abogado' remains reserved so that it can only be assigned to a person, entity or corporation proposed or accepted by the Spanish Government … This would allow us to ensure third-level domain names representing law firms or law professionals acting in Spain have and maintain the credentials needed to carry out this profession in our country."

While a little controlling, the Spanish government is at least intending to make use of *.es.abogado to provide useful information – elreg.es.abogado could only be bagged by The Reg if we were in fact a legit office of Spanish lawyers rather than hungover tech journalists, for instance.

Spain then provides the exact same rationale for hanging a veto over *.es.bingo and *.es.casino domains. It has gambling laws; it's also arguable.

But then we hit Italy. And the domain name it.pizza. Italy is vetoing the release of it.pizza. Here’s why:

IT is the country code for Italy and since 2010 “pizza” is a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed (TSG) of Italy. The combination of our ccSLD [country code second-level domain] with the name of a TSG could lead the online consumers to believe that they are buying a genuine pizza, prepared with ingredients with specific qualities characteristics and cooked following the original recipe, while there is no current guarantee by the Registry that those requirements would be fulfilled.

Bet you never knew when you were ordering a Dominos pizza that you were not getting a real pizza, did you? Well, Italy plans to resolve that issue with the use of a domain name. "This would allow the Italian government to ensure third level domain names representing professional pizza makers or pizza restaurants and which have and maintain the right to define their cooked food as genuine pizza to consequently use the respective registered logo," we're told.

Of course, this wouldn't stop any pizza shop in the entire world from simply registering their name under the .pizza top-level domain, like elreg.pizza. The domain would be shorter, and not include an extraneous .it, and presumably it would still be allowed to display the official pizza logo.

The Italians also copied the Spanish government's stance on *.it.bingo and *.it.casino.