CATALONIA
On October 1, a referendum will be held on whether Catalonia, an
autonomous region of the northeast of Spain, should declare itself to be
an independent country. The Spanish government has ruled the
referendum illegal, and is taking action on a number of fronts to shut
it down and to censor communications promoting it. One of its latest
moves in this campaign was a Tuesday police raid of the offices of
puntCAT, the domain registry that operates
the .cat top-level domain, resulting in the seizure of computers, the
arrest of its head of IT for sedition, and the deletion of domains
promoting the October 1 referendum, such as refoct1.cat (that website is
now available at an alternate URL).
