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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

whoa there, slow down, there's .cat?!

Catalan culture. A regional-cultural TLD. If small countries get TLDs, why shouldn't a tightly connected culture of ~5 million get one too?

I'm all for .cat, but I can see the arguments against. People are already campaigning for .cym for Wales, so where do we stop? Do all the regional communities on Spain get one (Basque country, Asturias, Galicia, the list goes on). Do the Saami in Scandinavia get one? (They have their own parliaments, so why not TLDs?) What about Native Americans / First Nations? At least being a country is a criterion that works 95+ percent of the time

>> People are already campaigning for .cym for Wales, so where do we stop?

Wales is recognised as a country, not a "regional community"

Um, actually the constitutional status of Wales is a murky topic, and even if that were to be cleared up unambiguously, how do you compare statuses across constitutions?

It's really not that murky. I'm hard pushed to find any organisation that doesn't classify Wales as a country.

The EU? The UN?

Wales is a constituent country of the United Kingdom and has some devolved power. However, it is the United Kingdom which is internationally recognised.

They don't have their own seat at the UN for instance. They don't field their own team at the Olympics.

If Wales needs a tld, what about Texas? Texas has a distinct culture and was once an independent republic. I'm sure people from Wales think they are independent in some way that Texas is not, but people from Texas think those thoughts too.

It is actually extremely murky, because there is no single document which states what the constitutional status is, there is a patchwork of legislation which refers to England and Wales, then there are the Wales-specific acts such as the Welsh Language Acts, and then there's the devolution and the devolved legislation (which establishes that Wales is to some degree independent within the UK). The constitutional problem, in a nutshell, is that Henry VIII introduced the Laws in Wales Acts to create the legal entity "England and Wales", but there had been no legal entity "Wales" before he did.

Also, if Wales is already a country, why is independence the stated aim of Plaid Cymru :)?

.cat is because of their language. I think it makes sense.

I mean Catalán, not lolcat :-)

I'd think .cym for Welsh language sites would be a good thing. I'd see a lot more point in that than .net, a general-purpose namespace which is used generally by people too slow off the mark to register the .com (yes, I know it wasn't intended to be that way).

What's wrong with cym.uk?

Wales isn't a country!? I would have thought of all people, someone with a handle like "anghyflawn" might be a bit more compassionate to the plight of the cymry...

Wales is not a sovereign state, which is what "country" means in this context.

If you're going to abuse Wikipedia that way, you should be referring to him as Jimbo.

I think you misunderstand me :). I don't think .cym is a bad idea at all, but I can understand those who might think it is not. Wales is not a country in the way that Russia, Tuvalu, Kenya or even Jersey are (and even in the latter sense there are fringe cases such as Western Sahara, Kosovo and South Ossetia). If Catalonia and Wales are OK, is Sápmi? What about culturally distinct minorities with no political recognition such as the Roma? It's just too messy.

Doesn't that argue for .trek as well?

If you can find a few million who spend most of their time in the cultural group of trekkies, then yeah.

But still, deregulation and all. Domains will stop mattering somewhen soon. Search engines are important.

In the same way as .tv is for Tuvalu.

Tuvalu is an actual country (which is why it gets a cctld). Catalonia is an administrative division of Spain.

If Catalonia has its own TLD, why not California or Maine? If it's a català tld, why doesn't brezhoneg get one? Or cymraeg? Or võru, saami, euskara, söl'ring, cemhuî or ajië?

> If Catalonia has its own TLD, why not California or Maine?

Politics.

It's not Catalonia, it's Catalan.

Catalan is spoken in these regions: (spain) Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca, some of Aragon in South-Eastern France a town in Sardinia (Alguer / Alghero) Andorra (a small country)

For the rest of cultural/linguistic TLDs... have they asked for one?

> It's not Catalonia, it's Catalan.

You may want to note that my comment had two clauses, and that this is handled in the second one.

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