The .cat, a little-told story

When the internet began to spread throughout society in the 1990s, beyond academic and research centers, the need to define its governance became evident, and one of the issues was deciding what websites could be called and who would manage them. On the internet, websites have first and last names, and, as with people, the last name indicates which family you belong to. This is the last part of a web address, the one that comes after the period, and there are general (.com, .org), country (.es, .fr), and thematic (.museum, .coop) addresses. They call it TLDs (Top-Level Domain). Initially, the person in charge of coordinating this issue was Jon Postel, who in 1996 initiated a debate on what the Internet's domain name system should be.

Already at that time, a group of Catalans, most notably Amadeu Abril, launched a campaign to achieve "a TLD for our people." This led to the unanimous approval of a motion by the Catalan Parliament on October 24, 1996, with the explicit support of all political parties. Despite this support, the idea did not advance because two-letter TLDs are reserved for countries. This led to a split among the initiative's promoters: those who believed that abandoning .ct meant abandoning the goal of becoming a country, and those who considered the option of requesting .cat as a way to "get around the wall."

Meanwhile, the Internet continued to organize itself, and in November 1998, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was created, a non-profit foundation mandated to manage the Internet's Domain Name System. Amadeu Abril was already on its board. Since 1984, in addition to country domains, there were the suffixes .com, .edu, .org, .net, .gov, and little else. In 2000, ICANN decided to open up to other interest communities and, very prudently, called for its first round of proposals for the creation of new domains. The Catalan group decided not to participate, given that ICANN was being very cautious, as demonstrated by the fact that only seven new domains were accepted (.biz, .coop, .info, .museum, etc.).

In parallel, the Catalans continued to organize themselves. Once the debate between .ct and .cat ("trading the passport for the dictionary") was over, the puntCAT Association was created on November 23, 2001. It was made up of entities (not individuals or companies) that supported Catalan culture, covering any Catalan-speaking territory. More than ninety organizations from around the world were mobilized, from the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (with a key role) to the Casal Català in Melbourne, Australia.

The shift in support for Catalan

On December 15, 2003, ICANN opened a second round of applications to receive new domain proposals. By the deadline of March 16, 2004, ten applications had been submitted, one of which was from the puntCAT Association, formally requesting the .cat domain. Since ICANN had not anticipated that a culture would submit proposals to a call for "communities of interest," the association demonstrated its strength by accrediting the support of 65,468 individuals, 2,615 companies, and 98 entities from all Catalan-speaking territories.

March 2004 was precisely the time of the terrorist attacks in Madrid, which decisively influenced the change of government in Spain. The outgoing Spanish government, led by José María Aznar, was opposed to the idea of .cat and had made efforts with the US Departments of State and Commerce to block the initiative. However, the change of government placed José Montilla in charge of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, and therefore also the Secretary of State for Telecommunications. With the political change, the puntCAT Association obtained a formal letter of support from the Spanish government and another from the government of Andorra, meeting a condition ICANN had raised: demonstrating support from governments where Catalan was an official language.

In May 2004, ICANN President Vint Cerf and ICANN Board Liaison John Klensin visited Barcelona as part of INET 2004 and participated in a public event on the .cat domain. Both were reluctant to the idea of an Internet community being defined by language and culture, and ICANN generally feared that the .cat precedent would lead to thousands of new applications. It took an intense and sustained effort of diplomacy and technical, economic, and social arguments.

Finally, on February 18, 2005, the ICANN board voted in favor of the .cat domain, but had not yet made the decision public. Steps were taken to sign a contract with the puntCAT Foundation, the association's heir and future manager of the new domain. The terms of the agreement became clear at the end of July, and ICANN once again asked if the idea was supported by the Spanish and Andorran governments. Both governments confirmed this in early September, and ICANN announced the approval of the new .cat domain on September 15, 2005. Catalan culture became the first in the world to have its own domain on the Internet.

The Challenges of Catalan

.cat was born at the same time as YouTube and Facebook and has just turned twenty years old, enjoying excellent results, with more than 113,000 registered domains and sustained, qualitative growth. The .cat domain is older than Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, Airbnb, Uber, Revolut, Glovo, Zoom, and OpenAI. It's clear that the internet has changed, and so have the challenges facing the Catalan-speaking community. To defend and promote our culture, a domain is no longer enough; we also need to be mindful of how many results are in Catalan when we do a Google search, or whether ChatGPT has responded to us using information sources from our local area or who knows where. We must be attentive to new formats and new groups creating content in our language. And to our rights, now that the world is discussing concepts such as digital identity, privacy, and personalization.

For all these reasons, on June 3, 2025, the puntCAT Foundation was re-founded as the Accent Obert Foundation, the proud heir to an extraordinary collective gesture that updates its mission to grow its activity beyond the .cat domain and continue defending our way of being digitally.