.cat: the key to our cultural sovereignty on the Internet

«The limits of my language mean the limits of my world»

Proposition 5.6, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Ludwig Wittgenstein

At Accent Obert, we understand the .cat domain as an essential piece of infrastructure to support and promote our cultural sovereignty on the Internet. Twenty years ago, we carved out our corner of the web, and now we are redefining who we are and what we do.

We take this moment to share with you our vision of the domain’s importance for what we call the cultural sovereignty of the Catalan-speaking community.

The culture to which .cat belongs

Defining the scope and limits of a culture is a genuinely difficult, and often contentious, task. Our beliefs, our values, the customs of the places we live in all form part of what we understand by culture, and each of us sees these elements differently. The way we express and share them is itself a part of culture, because it is through the pooling of these elements — their differences and the compromises we reach — that a shared territory is established, one where a community united by a culture, its own idea of culture, is built. A culture, full stop.

This process of cultural construction gives us the map that helps us navigate a permanently evolving reality. For a culture to stay alive, it must be kept in this state of constant renewal, because ideas, people, our work, our lives, everything around us is in constant flux. And this change, this need for permanent renewal, manifests itself in how we make sense of the world. In how we communicate. In how we explain things to one another.

Language is the key to this process. But language has never been merely an instrument of communication. A language is much more than the medium through which a community communicates: it is the material with which that community fashions its culture — that living, shifting map that allows it to endure, preserve memory and project itself into the future. This idea is as old as thought itself. And thought — culture — which can only be articulated through words, feels like our own when we are part of it. That idea does not change. What does change, and ever more rapidly, is the context in which that thought must live.

The .cat domain as a vehicle for our culture

Our lives have unfolded largely on the Internet for many years now — as many as the domain has existed. Digital space is not a mirror of reality: it is reality itself. It is the territory where culture is constructed, and where the cultural battles of our time are fought. Public discourse, content creation, the tools with which we transform the world — and how we make sense of it all — are found on the Internet, found on our digital map. A map onto which the .cat domain burst twenty years ago, with the clear determination to help give structure to the community from which it was born.

The big idea behind the project that gave rise to the puntCAT Foundation was the intuition that the Internet would become the prism of the reality that was coming. That it would be the technology in which we would live, and in which the boundaries of debates and the reach of ideas would be defined. And that a compass was needed for building this new map. The Internet was never purely a technical territory. It was born with the ambition of being the environment in which communication would live, and the place where we could communicate freely and openly, without our voices having to pass through the filters of states or the agenda of the companies controlling the media.

This sentiment was given vivid expression by John Perry Barlow in his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. Many of the Internet’s pioneers regarded this declaration as the founding document on which the network should operate. And, like all founding documents, it captures the feeling of a moment and a set of ideas — a moment and ideas that also gave rise to the origins of the .cat domain project.

.cat facing today’s threats

The reality the Internet faces today, however, is subject to pressure from two very powerful forces: the controlling impulse of states, and the monopolistic drive of large technology corporations, with the restrictions and surrender of rights entailed by what are known as walled gardens.

In this vulnerable landscape, we possess a tool so present in our lives that it often goes unnoticed: the .cat domain. Managed by Accent Obert in close collaboration with civil society, this domain is a fundamental instrument of technological sovereignty and the centrepiece of a project far broader and more ambitious than the mere administration of a technical resource: making it possible for anyone to live fully in Catalan in the digital world.

Yet being present digitally is not enough to guarantee our sovereignty. The question today is not only about having our own space on the network, but about making ourselves strong enough to show the world that we must be reckoned with when the rules of the game on the Internet are being decided: with what tools we communicate in Catalan; whether search engines and algorithms recognise it; whether platforms treat it on equal terms; whether artificial intelligences, beyond speaking it, understand and integrate the culture it represents. When the parties that set these conditions are exclusively outside actors — large companies or states with other priorities — our capacity to decide our own digital future fades away.

Establishing these conditions ourselves, through our own infrastructures and institutions, is what we call cultural sovereignty on the Internet.

The economic threat: the danger of a two-speed network

To understand the relevance of the .cat domain in relation to its use on the Internet by shops, businesses and creators — by any of us — we must first analyse the global economic battle being waged around network neutrality. Digital public policy theorists such as Tim Wu and Lawrence Lessig have long warned of the danger that large operators will break the original design of the Internet: the TCP/IP protocol that guarantees all traffic is treated equally, and the standards and policies coordinated at a global level by, among others, ICANN — the body of which the .cat domain is an active member.

If paid prioritisation is permitted, large corporations — such as streaming platforms or social networks — can establish different access tolls, so that some content reaches users in good condition while other content is relegated to the background.

This deregulated model poses an existential risk to cultures with a medium-sized or small linguistic market. And it is not an abstract threat: the ecosystem of content creation in Catalan is experiencing a period of sustained growth, with more consumption, more activity and more creators than ever, as Accent Obert’s Llista observatory confirms year after year. Initiatives such as the Crit! awards — which in both their editions have filled the TNC and the Teatre Coliseum to celebrate digital talent in Catalan — demonstrate that this ecosystem exists and is thriving. But if speed and accessibility depend on each person’s economic capacity, these creators, media outlets and businesses committed to Catalan will be left behind through lack of resources. Protecting neutrality is therefore a survival measure for our digital fabric.

The importance of civil rights on the Internet

Recent history shows us that the margin separating economic control from political censorship is very narrow. When basic infrastructure is not managed from the standpoint of public service and citizens’ rights, it can end up being used to restrict freedom of expression.

We have experienced this first-hand. At moments of peak political tension, our network has suffered episodes of intervention, traffic blocking, deliberate slowing (throttling) and website shutdowns. When access to information becomes a subject of dispute, the topology of the network — how servers connect and where they are anchored — becomes a matter of fundamental civil rights. Whoever controls access to information has the power to shape public debate.

This is why the defence of digital rights, both individual and collective, cannot be a reactive response to isolated incidents, but must be a constant endeavour. It is what Accent Obert articulates through its «Defensem» strand, with projects such as the 4D congress on democratic digitalisation and digital rights, and participation in the Alliance for the digital presence of Catalan — which has reversed Google’s algorithm and driven the arrival of our language in cars and televisions: an organised response to the threats of this new digital context.

Accent Obert, guarantor of our cultural sovereignty

In this context, the role of Accent Obert takes on its full meaning. As a private, non-profit organisation that independently manages the domain registry, Accent Obert acts as the primary guarantor of the digital security of the Catalan-speaking community.

The fact that .cat is a domain managed from the bottom up provides a decisive technological firewall. In the face of attempts at centralisation or at restricting freedom of expression on the network, having our own infrastructure and an organisation that upholds transparency, privacy and non-discrimination for users is a strategic advantage almost unique in the world for a community without a state behind it.

But Accent Obert does not only administer internet addresses. Its activity extends to the entire digital life cycle of the language: managing strategic infrastructures with criteria of technical excellence and the common good; providing digital tools in Catalan — from services such as jo.cat, va.cat and ja.cat to the Galàxia project; promoting talent through the Crit!, Llista and Digitalitzem-nos awards; and, with projects such as Frec, working to ensure that even artificial intelligence — the great challenge of the next twenty years of the domain — learns to interact with tools and services in Catalan. This role, constant if often invisible, ensures that our «digital highways» maintain the open, neutral standards that make it possible for any citizen, company or institution to express themselves and compete on equal terms, without fear of being silenced for political or economic reasons that are not their own.

Being sovereign so as not to be dependent

The .cat ecosystem leaves us with a clear lesson for the future. In a global digital environment, sovereignty is not proclaimed: it is exercised by building and defending our own structures.

In the face of an internet model torn between digital authoritarianism and private oligopoly, the civil society coalition around Accent Obert — defending rights, providing tools, promoting talent and managing infrastructures — demonstrates that it is possible to maintain a space of our own that is resilient, free and neutral. Freedom of expression and the economic viability of our collective future depend on a simple idea: either we are sovereign over our digital infrastructure, or we will be dependent users on other people’s networks.