The .cat domain at ICANN86 in Seville
This week, from 8 to 11 June, Seville hosts the ICANN86 Policy Forum, the annual meeting organised by ICANN. It is the first time that a public ICANN meeting has taken place in Seville. The previous one held in Spain was in Barcelona, in 2018.
This year, the central topics revolve around the current and future impact of artificial intelligence on DNS usage and the New Domain Round that opened on 30 April 2026, as this ICANN meeting will be the last before the deadline for submitting new applications closes.
A key moment for domains like .cat
ICANN86 comes at a particularly significant moment for the .cat domain and for all domains representing linguistic and cultural communities. On 30 April, ICANN opened the application period for the new round of the new gTLD programme, the window for creating new domain extensions on the Internet. It will remain open until 12 August 2026. This round expands the number of accepted scripts to 27, including Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari and Thai — an important step towards a more diverse and accessible Internet.
In addition to meeting with many of the accredited registrars for the .cat domain, we will also take part in the geoTLD group meeting, the gathering space for geoterritory and linguistic domains, a very important part of our role at ICANN, where we will present the progress of the research project on positioning in traditional search engines and LLMs that we lead from .cat.
.cat, present in Seville
Accent Obert, the organisation that manages the .cat domain, will have two representatives: Beatriz Guzmán, Domains Director, and Nacho Amadoz, Legal Director.
An opportunity to continue building international alliances, take part in the debates that will shape the future of the Internet, and highlight the role that .cat has played since 2005 as a benchmark for other linguistic communities around the world.
And the very next day, on 12 June, the .cat domain celebrates its 20th anniversary institutional event in Barcelona. Two dates, one single community that keeps building its place on the Internet.
