.cat?

First time seeing this cctld: More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cat

It's not a ccTLD.
It's an sTLD for the Catalan community- for sites in/about Catalunya or in the Catalan language.
Not for speculation.

.cat :lol:
Crazy

Thanks folks !
i though of getting the pussy.cat :D
oh my god 699$ LOL

beowulf said:

i though of getting the pussy.cat :D

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Somebody hurry and grab:
CuriosityKilledThe.cat

dang fat.cat taken lol

I just came back from spain and seen this everywhere in Barcelona

At first I had no idea what it was - then quickly found out it is catalan

There were MANY trains on the metro that used .cat along with many buses and signs that I seen.

.cat is well known in catalonia, but it is not good for especulation. You are forced to use the domain and also using the catalonian language

In Barcelona I've seen .es, .com & .cat, my impression is that .es is most used.
The .cat domains often tend to be official websites.

http://meow.cat/ is developed and pretty funny.

.dog anyone ?

Ben42 said:

http://meow.cat/ is developed and pretty funny.

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it could also get the boot since there's no catalan version

I think that you will find more information if you check Wikipedia.. It covers many interesting things.

The Fundació puntCAT is a politically independent, non-profit institution founded on December 28th 2004 and registered as no. 2100 in the Government of Catalonia's Register of Foundations.

As a foundation, its objective is to promote all types of activities' related to the creation, management and control of the .CAT domain register and in general the promotion of Catalan language and culture on the Internet and in the new information technology media.

http://fundacio.cat/en_index.html

I live in Catalonia. .cat is everywhere here. Even the local government and the Barcelona municipal websites switched to .cat as their prime domain. FC Barcelona switched to .cat too. Local public transport, local healthcare services, ... all .cat now.

I think you need to live here a while to understand the whole thing. When I emigrated to Catalonia/Spain I had no idea what to expect of the Catalan nationalism. It appears to be very strong, to the extent that in the past some municipalities and institutions used all sort of exotic ccTLDs to avoid having to use the .es suffix. Girona, one of the biggest cities in Catalonia, used girona.gi in order to avoid using .es ; most of those are now using .cat

.es is NOT that popular here as many people still have a somewhat negative undertone of Spanish nationalism. I don't see .es domains in advertisements that often really, most use .cat or a generic TLD.

I am surprised the Basque Country did not try to get a domain for itself too, because there the anti-Spanish sentiments are rooted even deeper. Lot of websites in the Basque language use .eu due to Basque Country being translatable as Euskadi.

Registering a .cat domain is not that easy. Your application is reviewed first, and if your site isn't at least partially in Catalan, it is likely your request will get rejected.

Gerrit said:

I am surprised the Basque Country did not try to get a domain for itself too, because there the anti-Spanish sentiments are rooted even deeper. Lot of websites in the Basque language use .eu due to Basque Country being translatable as Euskadi.

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See:
http://www.puntueus.org/eu/

Been around for a year or so at least.

S~

Seems to be a proposed new extention which is still pending with ICANN and IANA rather than fully operative already. Hence why many Basque language sites use .eu (like in EUskadi) as extention right now. Seems like .eus is currently battling to get accepted as a new suffix but not operative yet.

I also see .scot there ... Never understood why nobody tried to brand .sc for Scotland.

Despite living in Catalonia, I am not such a proponent of .cat, because of the precedent it created. If all minority languages would ask for new extentions... Frysia, Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Bretognese, Roma language, Kurdish language, ... probably forgetting many. If we'd all give them a proper suffix like we did with .cat, we'd get another 20 or 30 extentions. And we already got so many obscure extentions. .cat created a precedent which could lead to just another long list of obscure extentions.

There's no extension that is more legitimate than those languages extensions, unlike all those crappy commercial extensions that ICANN is releasing which are pretty much a racket to corporations that need to buy all of them to protect their brands.

altb said:

There's no extension that is more legitimate than those languages extensions, unlike all those crappy commercial extensions that ICANN is releasing which are pretty much a racket to corporations that need to buy all of them to protect their brands.

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Disagree. Country extentions make sense. Linguistic extentions is opening a can of worms. What about languages where so many variants exist that regional groups consider their dialect a separate language? What with languages where the amount of those speaking it is less than 1000? What about dead of virtually dead languages? What about oppressed languages?

It's opening a can of worms. I'd say all those new extentions make it only harder to see the forest from the trees.

I also live in Catalonia.
.cat is a very popular extension here, with more than 50.000 registered domains. Take into account that there's only 7M population.

Primerlloc said:

I also live in Catalonia.
.cat is a very popular extension here, with more than 50.000 registered domains. Take into account that there's only 7M population.

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Australia has about twenty three million and over one million .com.au names registered , domains are making inroads here, but more the cctld than .com or any other brand

Food for thought