There flourished internet cats that wanted cheeseburgers, internet cats that were grumpy, internet cats that played keyboards, and an internet cat with an enviable life of the mind.

In 2013, a cat food company, Friskies, promulgated a rumor that 15 percent of all internet traffic was cat-related. That this was even believable speaks to cats’ status as rulers of the digital jungle.

“At this point I’d argue cats are famous because cats are famous, a self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps perpetuating itself,” said Jason Eppink, a curator at the Museum of the Moving Image who organized an exhibit about cats online in 2015.

Given the web’s rich cat history, you’d think that domain names ending in .cat would be another online feline gold mine. But that has not been the case, apart from some exceptions like this site for the famously delightful or perhaps annoying meme, Nyan Cat.

Almost all sites with the .cat suffix belong to the Catalan-speaking community thanks to the efforts of the puntCAT (“dot-cat” in Catalan), the foundation approved in 2005 to manage the domain’s registry by the global Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. That made it one of the first domains to explicitly refer to a language and culture, paving the way for others, when it first appeared in 2006.

