Yahoo! changes its Allah policy

Posted by Bertrand Pecquerie on February 28, 2006 at 9:01 AM

Does God like the internet? According to geek.com and ZDnet, "Ed Callahan had trouble getting his mother a Yahoo! e-mail address with their last name, but not because it was already taken. Rather, the name was disallowed by the company's systems because it contained the consecutive letters a-l-l-a-h, the Arabic word for God.

Callahan did further investigation and discovered that other words associated with religion were okay, just not the specific letters making up "Allah." Mr. Callahan seemed to think the policy was discriminatory, telling the Associated Press, "The war on terror is becoming a war on Muslims. The word 'terrorist' now means Muslims, and it shouldn't... They disallowed 'allah' but allowed 'jesus' and 'god,' and I don't think there is a rational explanation for that.'"

Yahoo! announced last week that it had changed its policy, and Ed was able to register the e-mail address. Yahoo! said the reason for the policy was not to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to protect the word Allah from potentially hateful speech: "A small number of people registered for IDs using specific terms with the sole purpose of promoting hate, and then used those IDs to post content that was harmful or threatening to others, thus violating Yahoo's Terms of Service," the statement said. "'Allah' was one word being used for these purposes, with instances tied to defamatory language. We took steps to help protect our users by prohibiting use of the term in Yahoo usernames. We recently re-evaluated the term 'Allah,' and users can now register for IDs with this word because it is no longer a significant target for abuse."

The existence of the ban made a bit of a splash on the Web after it was reported in The Daily Hampshire Gazette and picked up by The Register and Slashdot end of February.

Source: geek.com and ZDNet

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