.cat is a sponsored TLD approved in September 2005 by the ICANN. It is available for use. It is intended to be used to highlight Catalan language and culture. It is sponsored by Associació puntCAT.

Before .cat was available, and given the reluctancy of certain Catalan institutions, companies and people to use .es or .fr domains for their webpages, alternatives (sometimes bizarre or ironic) emerged. An example of this is the webpage for Girona, a city in Catalonia. The site bears the domain .gi, which actually indicates Gibraltar ("http://www.ajuntament.gi/", the word "ajuntament" meaning "town hall"). This is to the embarrassment of the Spanish Government: since United Kingdom claims sovereignty over Gibraltar, a Spanish town using a Gibraltar domain might be seen as an endorsement of the status quo. Oddly enough, this was done with the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya in office, an ally to Partido Socialista Obrero Español, which firmly opposes both Catalan independence and UK's sovereignity over Gibraltar.

ICANN has expressly prohibited the use of the .cat domain for pages about cats, unless they are written in Catalan or concerning Catalan culture.

See also

• .sco for Scotland

External links

• Information and register process
• Associació puntCAT
• Cultural diversity in cyberspace: The Catalan campaign to win the new .cat top level domain

Generic top-level domains | Catalan language | Catalan media

.cat | .cat | Domini .cat | .cat | .cat | .cat | .cat | トップレベルドメイン#sTLD（スポンサー付き） | .cat | .cat