Genís Roca, 23 April 2026
On a Sant Jordi’s Day like today, twenty years ago, the domini .cat opened to the public. In hindsight, what seemed like a minor event in the panorama of an expanding Internet carried far greater significance than its founders could have imagined at the time. It was not simply a matter of adding a new ending to the digital addresses now used by more than 117,000 individuals, businesses, organisations and institutions. Nor was it merely about giving visibility to a community — ours — with a particular language and culture. What was truly at stake was a deeper idea, one that time has made only more evident: if the Internet was to be a representation of the world, it also had to be capable of representing the world’s diversity.
That is, in all likelihood, the .cat’s greatest contribution. It was not born to defend a folkloric quirk or to demand preferential treatment for Catalan speakers. It was born to demonstrate that the network could be fairer and more accurate if it recognised the cultural and linguistic communities that exist in the physical world and gave them their own voice and space in the digital one. In this sense, the .cat has not been useful only to Catalan speakers. It has been useful, above all, to the Internet itself. Our domain opened a path that other communities around the world have since followed. And it helped consolidate an idea that, today, sadly, still needs defending: that linguistic and cultural plurality is not a problem to be managed, but a condition of possibility for the digital world.
Over these twenty years, the .cat has done exactly that: establishing itself as a useful, high-quality infrastructure with a vocation for public service to the Catalan-speaking community. It has helped individuals, businesses, organisations and institutions exist on the web without having to renounce their identity — with a clear positioning before the world and with the capacity for control and transparency over their digital presence. The .cat has demonstrated that a language, any language, is not merely a cultural marker, but also a tool for connection, trust, economic activity, and the production and dissemination of knowledge. And it has confirmed that when a community organises and mobilises, it can build an ecosystem as vibrant as it is stable — one capable of protecting and exercising its digital sovereignty.
Yet despite the milestone anniversary and record registration figures, the important anniversary is not only the twenty years we leave behind. It is, above all, the twenty years we are now beginning. Because the Internet — and the world with it — is changing again. Artificial intelligence is not simply another technology at our disposal: its emergence and widespread adoption are configuring a new layer of infrastructure that reshapes access to knowledge, cultural production, education and economic activity. Just as the Internet once transformed the circulation of information — as the printing press had done centuries before — it is now artificial intelligence that is altering how that information is processed, interpreted and converted into responses, recommendations and decisions that have real consequences in our daily lives.
In this new context, the challenge for the Catalan language is not simply to be present. The challenge is to be present in a meaningful way — with quality, and with operational capacity. It is not enough for a machine to respond in our language if it does so drawing on alien references, a sparse corpus, or a biased imaginary shaped by algorithms over which we have no influence. The question is no longer merely whether the language is visible, but whether it is structurally useful within the systems that will order digital life for decades to come. And here the .cat regains its full value: not as a relic of the past, but as one of the most solid and useful assets available to ensure that the Catalan language and culture continue to have their own voice in this new era.
That is why today we celebrate the domain — but we do so by launching new lines of work with a twenty-year horizon. The .cat leads a group of ten other domains from around the world that is analysing how traditional and AI-powered search engines treat content linked to cultural, linguistic and regional identities. This is not a defensive initiative. It is our concrete contribution to a broader question: if we want the Internet to remain a space of genuine plurality, we will need to intervene in the invisible layers that already determine what is found, what is recommended and what falls out of focus. Because these decisions are neither merely technical nor neutral: they define the future of the Internet and, with it, a decisive part of the future of the world.
We have not arrived late to this debate. We have been part of it from the beginning. We were active participants in the Internet when the network was only just taking shape, and we can be so again in its current redefinition — not because we are an admirably stubborn exception, but because our experience is genuinely useful. And universal. The case of the .cat demonstrates that communities can recognise themselves, organise, build their own infrastructure and contribute to the digital common good beyond their own borders. It is an example that speaks of the Catalan language, yes — but also of the model of Internet we defend: a model that refuses to resign itself to the homogenisation to which some would condemn it.
The next twenty years will demand new civil society institutions: flexible, ambitious, and capable of representing our community in a world in constant transformation. Institutions that understand the technological nature of these changes and their consequences, that can defend collective rights in increasingly dehumanised environments, and that can guarantee cultural and linguistic diversity a place in the digital infrastructures of the future. That is the challenge. And that is the work that Accent Obert — proud heir to the Fundació .cat — takes on, drawing on twenty years of experience managing the .cat domain. Because if the .cat has been an indispensable asset for understanding the last twenty years of the Internet, all signs point to it needing to be even more so in the twenty that are now beginning.
