I have a bad habit of window-shopping domain names, even without a project in mind. Part of the appeal is the slew of gTLDs (generic Top-Level Domains). There are the common ones that people associate with websites: .com, .org, .net, etc; but, there are many more.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority catalogs over 1,500 TLDs at the time of writing (March 2026), ranging from political parties (.democrat, .republican), industries (.dental, .cars, .catering, etc), and countries (.vg, .mt, .rs, etc). However, my favorite are the surprisingly non-serious options, such as .computer, .ninja, .cool, and .sucks.
Given the vast array of topics that TLDs cover in a very limited number of characters, it should be expected that some terms overlap in unexpected ways. The title of this webpage is a reference to this series of real TLDs: .dog, .fish, .horse, and .cat. The first three (.dog, .fish, and .horse) are all dedicated for websites with content covering those specific animals. Consider .dog, the natural enemy of the house cat. The TLD is managed by Identity Digital (following its aquisition of Binky Moon LLC) which imposes no restrictions on the use of the domain name, meaning that anyone can purchase and use a .dog website for any reason.
However, .cat has the opposite situation. Rather than the feline, the "cat" is short for Catalonia, an autonomous community in northeastern Spain. In fact, its TLD Manager is the nonprofit Fundació puntCAT (which translate to English as the ".cat Foundation"). The nonprofit requires that any website using a .cat domain "have a significant amount of contents in Catalan" (per domini.cat). So, unless your cat is from the Catalonia region of Spain, it doesn't belong on a .cat domain. Ironically, the animal species most associated with internet culture is the only one without a dedicated Top-Level Domain.
Of course, that hasn't stopped people from bending the rules. The best example I can find is nyan.cat which features a language slider. Selecting "català" (the word for "Catalan" in Catalan) changes the header text from "NON-STOP NYAN CAT" to "NYAN CAT IMPARABLE!", but the other short fragments of text remain in English. Apparently, this was sufficient to pass the checks of Fundació puntCAT as the website is essentially unchanged since April 2011, although the language slider was only added in 2019 based on my Wayback Machine searches.
The timing of gTLD assignments explain why .cat is so different than the other .gTLDs I've mentioned. The .cat domain was assigned in 2005 and explicitly positions itself as "the first domain that represents a cultural community on the Internet" (per domini.cat). By contrast, .dog, .fish, and .horse are all newer creations stemming from mass 2014-2015 gTLD assignments, rather than an intentional, early Internet community efforts.
Last updated March 21, 2026