Spanish govt slammed over bizarre Catalan .cat internet registry cop raid

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Spanish govt slammed over bizarre Catalan .cat internet registry cop raid

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The Spanish government has come under increasing criticism for raiding the offices of the .cat internet registry in the lead-up to a referendum on Catalans’ independence.
On September 15, a Spanish court ordered the biz to take down domains ending in .cat that were being used to drum up support for the upcoming referendum.
Governments are extremely sensitive to geographic regions being represented online and in a recent expansion of the internet’s name space, such geography-based top-level domains were given special protections: governments were allowed to block specific dot-names if they referred to physical places (the most controversial example of which has been the fight over .amazon).
As solutions to the disputed region turned political and the region started asserting greater autonomy, the president of the Catalonia region announced in June this year that a binding referendum on independence would be held on October 1, 2017.
A week after the Catalan parliament approved the vote, the Spanish court issued its order to the .cat registry.
The referendum has become extremely politically contentious and the Spanish government has aggressively moved to shut down any support for it – leading to the court demand that .cat remove any domains that include information about the “illegal” referendum.
They currently display a message from the Spanish military police announcing in Spanish and English that the domain has been “seized pursuant to a seizure warrant.” The rest of the .cat registry is responding normally.
Spain’s prime minister was pulled into the dispute earlier this week when separatists took to the streets of Barcelona protesting the Spanish government’s efforts to stop the referendum from taking place.
The Spanish police had raided not just the offices of PuntoCat but also a number of regional government offices and arrested dozens of officials in an effort to prevent the referendum from taking place

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