The literal interpretation of the change is that Barcelona city council has ceased to concern itself with administration and now wishes to dedicate itself to the promotion of Catalan language and culture. The first I knew of it was when all my links all stopped working this afternoon. My guess is that Isabel Ricart, “Internet Technical Director”, got frustrated with only having converted 30% of users after 11 months, despite presumably having redirected internal links. And so she thought, fuckem, I’ll just turn it off. Municipal elections coming up, babe.
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Literally, the move to .CAT doesn’t imply that Barcelona Ajuntament has “ceased to concern itself with administration and now wishes to dedicate itself to the promotion of Catalan language and culture”.
“This community is made up of those who use the Catalan language for their online communications, and/or promote the different aspects of Catalan culture online.”
So logically, they can have the .cat domain and not promote Catalan culture. Whether or not this change is an example of pretty pathetic politicking… on that, I agree with you. I guess you saw the move from elpais.es to elpais.com too…
@anon: It’s working again, so I’ll crawl back in my hole and drink more coffee next Monday.
@Tom: I’m clearly doing something wrong if you agree on anything ;-) Government’s duty is to provide us with decent services in return for our taxes, not to serve one particular linguistic community to the apparent exclusion of the rest (I haven’t noticed a move to introduce bcn.cas for Spanish speakers or bcn.eng for us). Since Barcelona is still subordinated in an administrative sense to Spain, the simplest and most intelligent thing would surely be for it to remain an .es. What El País does doesn’t concern me because I’m not obliged to buy their product, and if they see themselves as a global medium, then good luck to them. No one, however, makes bigger fools of themselves than Girona council, which claims to be something to do with Gibraltar: http://www.ajuntament.gi/ Someone kick their arses, please.
Yes, that Girona thing is hilarious. Perhaps the Crown could offer protection to Catalonia in the same way they do to Gibraltar? It would mean formally becoming a British colony but at least they wouldn’t be a part of Spain any more…
I figure the Girona thing is also minorly about trying to get the Brits to feel guilty about the old War of the Spanish Succession thing: We Catalans helped you take Gibraltar, so how come you ran out on us in Barcelona? And that makes me larf and larf and larf.