The offices of the .cat gTLD registry Fundació puntCAT were raided by the Spanish police this morning. The company reported the incident via a series of tweets as the raid was being carried out. “Right now spanish police @guardiacivil is doing an intervention in our office @ICANN,” was tweeted just about 4 hours ago followed by another tweet reporting that the police was headed to CTO’s home. “We’re wating for him to arrive to our office to start the intervention.”
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
Michele Neylon writes: “The move comes a couple of days after a Spanish court ordered the domain registry to take down all .cat domain names being used by the upcoming Catalan referendum. The .cat domain registry currently has over 100 thousand active domain names, and in light of the actions taken by the Spanish government, it’s unclear how the registry will continue to operate if their offices are effectively shutdown by the Spanish authorities. The seizure won’t impact live domain names or general day to day operations by registrars, as the registry backend is run by CORE and leverages global DNS infrastructure. However, it is deeply worrying that the Spanish government’s actions would spill over onto an entire namespace.”