We Are All .cat: 20 Years of a Community That Has Made a Space on the Internet Its Own

The .cat community meets in person for the first time, at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the .cat domain and look towards the future.

Twenty years ago, the idea of having a domain of its own for a language and a culture without a state seemed, at the very least, unheard of. No one had ever done it before.

Today, that idea is part of our everyday digital landscape: we find it on the websites of businesses and shops, institutions, media outlets, cultural projects and organisations of all kinds. The .cat domain is there, and it is there because, for twenty years, thousands of people have decided, every day, that it had to be there.

That’s why, on 9 September, the .cat community gathered in person for the first time, in the Sala Gran of the Museu Marítim de Barcelona, to celebrate it.

A Success That Forces Us to Start Over

«Today we are celebrating a success», said Genís Roca, president of Accent Obert, the organisation that manages the .cat domain. «A curious success, because it forces us to start over.»

Twenty years ago it took the backing of 98 organisations, 2,615 companies and more than 65,000 people for .cat to come into being; now we face a new challenge in the digital world.

«Twenty years ago we told the world that cultures need a space so as not to disappear. Today we have another problem: someone else may be deciding that this space isn’t relevant and doesn’t deserve to be visited.»

The digital future will no longer depend solely on websites and search engines. Platforms, algorithms and artificial intelligence are already shaping our digital present. To face up to this, and to ensure that over the next twenty years we can live fully in the digital world, we will need the same collective drive and capacity to organise ourselves that won us .cat twenty years ago.

The Challenge Is No Longer Being on the Internet, But Deciding How We Are There

The panel discussion «The Next 20 Years: How Will We Live in Catalan in the Digital World?», moderated by Laura Grau, set out to tackle this question, bringing together four board members of Accent Obert: Rosa Romà (3Cat), Teresa Cabré (IEC), Elena Fort (FC Barcelona) and Núria Ribas (Amical Wikimedia), all of them representing some of the highest-traffic .cat domains in the world.

Coming from four very different fields, the conversation raised challenges with a shared underlying theme: it is not enough for Catalan simply to have a presence online. The future of Catalan on the Internet will not depend only on whether technology is capable of understanding and speaking Catalan, but above all on whether we, as a community, keep doing things worth explaining, sharing and preserving.

Watch the full conversation here about the next 20 years of Catalan in the digital world.

A Domain Only Makes Sense When Someone Fills It With Life

«We have a linguistic community that is active, stubborn, persevering, that knows how to mobilise, how to organise itself, how to anticipate,» said the Minister for Language Policy, the Honourable Francesc Xavier Vila.

It is precisely this community that has made .cat much more than a domain. It is the people, companies, institutions, organisations and projects that, over twenty years, have chosen to use it, who have turned an idea that once seemed impossible into an everyday reality: today, when we browse the Internet, .cat is part of the landscape because thousands of people have made it their own and filled it with content, knowledge, culture and activity.

That’s why celebrating these twenty years also means thanking everyone who made it possible, and recognising a collective capacity that remains as necessary as ever. The history of .cat shows that we know how to mobilise to win new spaces, physical and digital, and make them our own.

Now this community is beginning to put a face to itself, to meet and to listen to one another. The gathering at the Museu Marítim was the first step towards making this community more visible and, above all, the starting point for a closer relationship among all the members of the .cat community.

Now the challenge is not just to keep having a presence on the Internet, but to ensure that, twenty years from now, we can still live, create and connect fully in Catalan in the digital world. And that, just as it was twenty years ago, will only be possible if we do it together.

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