Ten years of the dot cat domain

Cat­alo­nia, Cata­lan and Cata­lan cul­ture opened up an im­por­tant door on the world 10 years ago when Icann, the body that as­signs in­ter­net ad­dresses, ap­proved the do­main name suf­fix .cat. It was the cul­mi­na­tion of years of strug­gle that began after it be­came clear that Cat­alo­nia would not be granted its own spe­cific do­main name suf­fix (such as .es for Spain or .it for Italy) that states are nor­mally granted. As is usual in such cases, Span­ish op­po­si­tion pre­vented ap­proval. How­ever, the State had no ar­gu­ments against the suf­fix made pos­si­ble by Icann's un­prece­dented de­ci­sion, re­fer­ring as it does to the cul­ture and lan­guage. Not that Spain did not try to stop the ini­tia­tive, but fi­nally the soundly pre­pared ar­gu­ments for the suf­fix that had sup­port from the ma­jor­ity of the coun­try's in­sti­tu­tions and or­gan­i­sa­tions won out. This meant, at the end of 2005, the .cat do­main name suf­fix came into op­er­a­tion as a land­mark mo­ment that re­in­forced Cata­lan iden­tity and im­proved the so­cial pres­tige of the Cata­lan lan­guage, as well as mak­ing Cat­alo­nia and its cul­ture more vis­i­ble around the world. Ac­cord­ing to some an­a­lysts it was Cat­alo­nia's first step to­wards in­de­pen­dence.

The data on the .cat do­main, man­aged by the Fun­dació punt­Cat, also show a decade of suc­cess. Apart from being the first of its kind, an ex­am­ple other cul­tures have fol­lowed, such as the Basques and the Scots, use of the suf­fix has grown spec­tac­u­larly and there are now more than 80,000 reg­is­tered users. It is a symp­tom of the nor­mal­ity we would like for other as­pects of the coun­try.