> In a letter to ICANN, the foundation said that the Spanish authorities had asked it to “block all .cat domain names that may contain any kind of information about the forthcoming independence referendum.”
This seems like a really strange thing for the Spanish government to do. Even if PuntCAT took down all separatist web from .cat, it seems like a certainty that you're going to create a local political embroilment, and the websites that were removed are just going to uncensor themselves by moving to .com/.net/.org/etc., and probably enjoy more popularity and attention than ever before.
You should probably only try to engage in this level of totalitarianism if you actually have the means to censor the internet for the vast majority of your citizenry. China and North Korea are in good positions to do it. The government of Spain is not.
The Spanish-Catalan argument going on at the moment should be of serious interest to sociopolitical hackers. The central government in Madrid is pulling out all the stops to prevent the holding of a symbolic referendum for regional independence, but it seems to be backfiring.
This seems like a really strange thing for the Spanish government to do. Even if PuntCAT took down all separatist web from .cat, it seems like a certainty that you're going to create a local political embroilment, and the websites that were removed are just going to uncensor themselves by moving to .com/.net/.org/etc., and probably enjoy more popularity and attention than ever before.
You should probably only try to engage in this level of totalitarianism if you actually have the means to censor the internet for the vast majority of your citizenry. China and North Korea are in good positions to do it. The government of Spain is not.