Raid is part of crackdown on Catalonia independence referendum.

As reported on DomainIncite and InternetNews.me overnight U.S. time, Spanish police have raided the offices of Fundació puntCAT, the registry operator for the .cat domain name.

.Cat is a domain name for the Catalonia region and people that speak Catalan.

Spanish authorities asked the registry to block domain names that were being used to spread information about an upcoming referendum for independence. puntCAT sent this letter to ICANN earlier this week to advise it about what was happening:

We have denounced to @ICANN the disproportionate action of the courts. Committed to freedom on the Internet. pic.twitter.com/NkvTMYJ79d — Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 17, 2017

Spanish authorities have raided the office and apparently taken some computers. According to InternetNews.me, they also arrested the group’s CTO. It’s unclear what arrested means in these circumstances.

There are over 100,000 .cat domain names registered. The ongoing operations should not be affected because puntCAT uses a third-party registry services provider, and because of the distributed nature of DNS. However, if certain domains are deleted or blocked, this could propagate across DNS.

It’s worth noting that .cat is not a country code domain name. It is a sponsored top level domain name.

Here are some pictures from the raid:

Right now spanish police @guardiacivil is doing an intervention in our office @ICANN pic.twitter.com/nh0b1lnrv7 — Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 20, 2017

@diariARA @elmonarac1 la Guardia Civil a la porta de la @puntcat tres cotxes i molts efectius. pic.twitter.com/HSVOqK43QQ — Guillem Fernandez (@guillemfg) September 20, 2017

Follow @puncat for updates.