#6 in 2017: Police raid a top level domain firm

This is the fifth in a series covering the top stories on DNW in 2017, as ranked by pageviews.

A police raid the domain name business? That’s unusual, and the story regarding it ranks among the top ten most viewed on DNW in 2017.

A big story in the mainstream press this year was Catalonia’s independence referendum and the ensuing protests that occurred. The controversy involved domain names even ahead of the referendum vote occurred.

Spanish authorities asked Fundació puntCAT, the group that operates the .cat domain name for the Catalonian people, to block certain domain names related to the referendum. The group refused.

Then, things got real when Spanish police raided Fundació puntCAT’s offices and arrested its head of IT, Pep Masoliver. The arrest might have been related to concerns other than merely deleting certain .cat domain names.

.Cat is a sponsored top level domain name, not a country code. There are regarding 100,000 .cat domains registered.