Raid is part of crackdown on Catalonia independence referendum.
As reported on DomainIncite and InternetNews.me overnight U.S. time, Spanish police have raided the offices of Fundació puntCAT, the registry operator for the .cat domain name.
.Cat is a domain name for the Catalonia region and people that speak Catalan.
Spanish authorities asked the registry to block domain names that were being used to spread information about an upcoming referendum for independence. puntCAT sent this letter to ICANN earlier this week to advise it about what was happening:
We have denounced to @ICANN the disproportionate action of the courts. Committed to freedom on the Internet. pic.twitter.com/NkvTMYJ79d
— Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 17, 2017
Spanish authorities have raided the office and apparently taken some computers. According to InternetNews.me, they also arrested the group’s CTO. It’s unclear what arrested means in these circumstances.
There are over 100,000 .cat domain names registered. The ongoing operations should not be affected because puntCAT uses a third-party registry services provider, and because of the distributed nature of DNS. However, if certain domains are deleted or blocked, this could propagate across DNS.
It’s worth noting that .cat is not a country code domain name. It is a sponsored top level domain name.
Here are some pictures from the raid:
Right now spanish police @guardiacivil is doing an intervention in our office @ICANN pic.twitter.com/nh0b1lnrv7
— Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 20, 2017
@diariARA @elmonarac1 la Guardia Civil a la porta de la @puntcat tres cotxes i molts efectius. pic.twitter.com/HSVOqK43QQ
— Guillem Fernandez (@guillemfg) September 20, 2017
Follow @puncat for updates.
abdussamad says
oh good. i hope the spaniards shut it down and ICANN then makes it available as a gTLD. .cat is too good of a TLD for a bunch of separatist nut jobs. It should be available to everyone around the world.
Oliver Burkill says
You think more cat pictures and puns on the internet is more important than someone else’s fight for freedom of self-determination?
abdussamad says
Of course. Besides one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist!
nicky says
Except that Catalonians have been completely peaceful in their efforts, so they are certainly not terrorists by any definition of the word.
Happy Unicorn says
Democracy in action! An informed electorate is the enemy of democracy, that’s what Thomas Jefferson said. Something kind of like that anyway. I’m fuzzy on the details…
thomas says
Be careful! People might believe your sarcasm is the truth.
“An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” -Jefferson
Malin says
They ignored judicial orders to shut down domain names that were infringing the law. It’s not something uncommon for them to be raided when they clearly ignore judicial orders. Every registrar, owner or registry must abide local laws and judicial orders when presented with them. Refusal gets them in jail. It’s how democratic states ruled by the laws and constitutions work.
John Berryhilll says
That seems to be what happened. In fact, when .cat was delegated, ICANN required PuntCat to get a letter of consent from Andorra and from Spain, and the .cat registry contract specifically states that they have to implement court orders which issue from any jurisdiction whose consent was required.
Whether one agrees with the court or whatever is irrelevant. If Verisign didn’t implement a US seizure warrant or US court order, then US Marshals would be at Verisign doing pretty much the same thing.
The additional arrest appears to be based on their IT guy allegedly providing technical support for the electronic vote count.
Apparently, we are supposed to believe that .cat is somehow exempt from court orders in the jurisdiction to which they agreed to comply as a condition for operating the TLD.
Jaume says
The law the Referendum la the Catalan Parliament passed allowed for the referendum to take place, the .cat registry did not break any law.
Anyway, the referendum has taken place now and the Yes to independence has won so this nightmare will soon be over as Spanish police will have to go back to Spain and they can raid newspapers and beat people up in their own country.