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Comment by Thiz | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered what is so special about catalan? Why do they deserve a special three letter domain nobody else has?

Who should I address a letter to request for the wayuu culture to have a .way tld?

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The thing is, the Catalan community has a very strong presence on the Internet.

As an example, the Catalan version of Wikipedia currently has +400.000 articles, being the 17th biggest.

To make clear what this means, you have to know that Catalan isn't even under the 100 most spoken languages worldwide (it has about 7 million speakers). So there is 1 article for every 17.5 people. Compared to the English version (4.4 million articles, 700 million speakers = 1 article every 159 people), or the Spanish one (1 million articles, 460 million speakers = 1 article every 460 people!), it is quite impressive.

So why would they want an own .cat domain? Because as a non-independent country / nationality, they are not allowed to have a two letter domain. Still, they wanted to be represented on the net so there was the PuntCAT foundation which did a huge effort in order to obtain the three letter .cat domain, but as it was sponsored, I imagine that they decided to restrict the usage of it to websites that have something to do with Catalan culture, or at least are written in Catalan.

I must say the Catalan culture and political movement is a pretty interesting topic itself, but I didn't want to make this post political, but rather interesting for "teh techies".

Provinces can get ccTLDs - Taiwan has .tw.

Sponsoring and getting .cat is a pretty cool workaround, though.

Can provinces really get ccTLDs? I thought .tw existed because Taiwan has an ISO country code: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_names_and_code_elements

Having said that, I'm not sure why the UK (whose country code is GB) uses .uk

Because GB Is "Great Britain" (England, Scotland, Wales)[1] which does not include Northern Ireland.

UK is "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" which is all four.

It was a politically motivated move basically.

[1] Lets not get pedantic here.

Hong Kong has a ccTLD (and an ISO country code, and a currency) but is not a country, while still mostly working like one.

IANA considers .tw to be "Taiwan, Province of China", as does that ISO link. As I understand, China pretty much bullied everyone else into not recognizing Taiwan so the rest of the world (like the UN) agrees Taiwan isn't a country. That's why one reason Microsoft asks for your Region, not country.

There appear to be other ccTLDs like .IO and .AQ that aren't countries. (Probably more.)

And I'm just being pedantic.

Both IO and AQ are ISO country codes as well. I'm not sure why.

Whether Taiwan is a province or a country is a contentious issue, and will depend heavily on who you ask.

Well as far as IANA concerned (which I suppose is the only relevant view for .tw), it's "Taiwan, Province of China"[1]:

https://www.iana.org/reports/2010/taiwan-report-07jun2010.ht...

For curiosity. Does Valencia and Balearics use the .cat domain?. They seem to call their Catalan "Valenciano", even if it is the same language.

I would love for the Appalachian culture to apply for the .app TLD.

What culture?

Maybe this will help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACountry_code_top-level_d...

Summarizing, we might not have qualified for a two-letter domain because we are not an independent country.

As a man married to a Catalan girl. Be careful where you are going :-).

ICANN.

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