.CAT or being someone on the internet

Some people say that Catalan history is just a mere sequence of defeats and frustrations. Well, though this may be true to some extent, we have certainly had our moments of happiness and success. One example of these moments came on September 16th 2006, when the ICANN approved the .cat domain. The .cat is a TLD (Top Level Domain) and was established to serve the needs of the Catalan Linguistic and Cultural Community on the Internet. Quoting from the Fundació PuntCat website (the non-profit foundation responsible for establishing registration requirements for domain names in the .cat TLD), “the Community consists of those who use the Catalan language for their online communications, and/or promote the different aspects of Catalan culture online, and/or want to specifically address their online communications to that Community”.

Despite not being a two letter domain as those used to identify countries  (such as .es, .mx, or.jp) nobody is so naive to believe that the .cat domain is merely a technical domain without any other symbolic power. Its huge political transcendence is beyond doubt, plain and simple, because it puts Catalonia out in the world as a different entity, almost just as much as a first class domain such .ct would do.

That’s why behind the .cat domain success (three years after its birth there are more than 35.000 registered .cat domains) there is a very long and tough process, during which many people struggled for years to finally come to a successful end.  Saül Gordillo gathered the full story behind this success in a highly interesting book called “Nació.cat” (Ed.Mina 2007), where he explains who were the leaders of the project, the role played by institutions such the Catalan and Spanish government (obviously pushing in opposite directions), the never-ending meetings with the ICANN members, and the rest of the ingredients that turned this almost impossible domain some years ago into a reality.