The 20 years of '.cat' in anecdotes: "And what do you want a domain for cats?"

BarcelonaMore than two decades ago, representatives of a very active Catalan-speaking internet community hinted to ICANN, the organization that regulates internet domains, about the possibility of creating a top-level domain not linked to any state (.fr, .uk, .es) or any type of activity (.com, .edu, .org), but to a language and a culture. The response was skepticism. "'What do you want a domain for cats for?', they asked us", recalled Amadeu Abril, one of the three original promoters of .cat, a few days ago, at an event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the domain.

The irony is that today, among the more than 118,000 active .cat domains (4.5% more than a year ago), there are more than 350 that do refer to cats and other felines, from the classic Gat.cat to the viral Nyan.cat. But the tone of the original question made it clear that, in 2003, requesting a domain for a stateless language was a technical and political anomaly. The first .cat domain that existed, in fact, was an inside joke among the engineers of the puntCAT Foundation: on December 21, 2005, they registered Tan.cat, which still works today.

Three Catalans before ICANN

Behind that response were Abril, Manel Sanromà and Jordi Alvinyà, the three promoters who on March 16, 2004, presented a formal application to ICANN with an argument that no other has ever been able to put forward: the explicit support of 98 entities and associations, 2,615 companies, and 65,468 citizens from all Catalan-speaking territories. This was precisely what decisively helped to open negotiations between ICANN and puntCat, the entity born as an association and later transformed into a foundation.

Along the way there were obstacles, including the formal protest of a Spanish ambassador to ICANN. But the political context also played in their favor, as Sanromà himself explained at the conference: "In part, we got the .cat thanks to the attacks of March 11 in Atocha, which led to a change in the government of the State, and the then Minister of Telecommunications, the Catalan José Montilla, did not oppose it as a member of the PP would have." ICANN finally approved the .cat domain on September 16, 2005, and on April 23, 2006, Sant Jordi's Day, registration was opened to everyone.

In the first year, 19,693 .cat domains were registered. Today there are more than 118,000, with a curve that has never been linear. There have been moments of euphoria, such as the early years or the wave of the "Procés" in 2017, and also of containment, typical of a mature market. The .cat, moreover, has a higher renewal rate than the .com: nine out of ten holders renew their domain each year, a figure that denotes, above all, usefulness. It is no coincidence: the .cat better positions Catalan content. Currently, in the first million most visited websites, there are 391 (79% more than in 2010) under the .cat domain, led by Gencat.cat.

The first two years the trend words were sant, for new municipal websites, and hotel, for tourism interest. It could be said that the registrations function as a seismograph of the country. In 2010, the year of the Constitutional Court's ruling on the Statute, the most repeated word in new domains was Catalunya. 2017 and 2018 were the years of republic and junts. And in 2020, with the lockdown on March 14, an avalanche of domains with covid was triggered, although 73% were abandoned before two years: the impulsive registration of an emergency that passed quickly. "When you trace twenty years of .cat data, you realize that the domain is, in reality, a diary of the country," summarizes Beatriz Guzmán, director of the domain area at Accent Obert (AO), the entity that inherited the Foundation and currently manages the .cat.

The domain has left home

86% of .cat domains still live in Catalan-speaking territories, but in 2006 they were 94%: the domain has been expanding its borders. Within Catalonia, Barcelona's share has dropped from three out of every four domains to almost one out of two, while Girona has gained ground. Outside the Principality, the Valencian Country has multiplied its registrations by eight since 2006.

Beyond territory, .cat has also made a fortune. After the rest of Spain (7,384 domains), the United States (1,764) and France (984) have a significant presence, followed by China (803) and Germany (587): Catalans in the diaspora, but also companies wanting to sell to Catalan speakers. The furthest point on the map is, literally, on the other side of the world: in New Zealand, two .cat domains are registered, a travel agency and an independent developer.

.cat accepts up to 63 characters, and someone has taken it seriously: the longest active domain –Arxiudelabasilicadelssantsmartirsjustipastor.cat– has 44. The shortest, on the other hand, is content with a single accented character: Ò.cat, from Òmnium Cultural. This takes advantage of the domain's ability to accept the eleven characters specific to the language

through so-called IDNs, which now account for 1.1% of the total .cat.

The language also leaves its mark each year. Since 2014, the neologism of the year consecrated by Termcat usually passes through the street and .cat domain registrations first (drones, estelades, cassolades), although words without direct commercial appeal tend to generate fewer registrations: in general, what can be sold is registered. There are domains that do not resign themselves to dying: one out of ten of those that have been deactivated, generally for violating rules on content or intellectual property, have been reborn. Messi.cat has lived six lives; Spotify.cat, eight; 404.cat, ten. The record, however, belongs to a strange trio: Realestate.cat, Sexy.cat and Pepsi.cat have each had eleven lives.

Small holders

Behind it all there are mostly ordinary people: according to Pep Masoliver, AO's director of innovation, almost half of the domains, 47.6%, are from a single domain, and 25.5% have between two and five. The first citizen to register one for personal use was Xavier Vernetta: Xaviervernetta.cat, which still works today. One in ten .cat domains contain a person's name, with "Montserrat, Montse i Blanca" and "Albert, Carles i Xavier" among the most repeated. Traditional culture has a weight: three out of four casteller groups with a website have chosen .cat, a figure that rises to 85% among traditional groups from the Principality, the Balearic Islands, and Northern Catalonia.

Vint anys després, the domain that was born between doubt and disbelief has become a reference for other linguistic and cultural communities that, since then, have followed the same path before ICANN. On the same commemorative day, Ronald Schwärzler, from geoTLD, the association representing geographic top-level domains, explicitly thanked the support that .cat has given them in their own dealings with ICANN. The domain of cats, the joke went twenty years ago, has ended up being the gateway for a language and a culture, without needing to have a state behind them, to have their own home on the internet.