As you know, the .barcelona domain forms part of the GeoTLD Group, an international non-profit organisation which represents the interests of top-level geographical domains identifying a city, a region, a language or a culture. This helps us work together with other domains with similar needs and characteristics and achieve improvements for our users.

Through the GeoTLD Group we’ll be working in 2023 to include domains such as .barcelona in the domains offered by WordPress, enabling websites created with this platform to use the domain which suits them best, according to their characteristics.

At the same time, Fundació.cat, the organisation which manages the .barcelona domain, forms part of the negotiating team with ICANN to include legal provisions in the contracts between domain registers and the domain registration companies that sell these domain, to be able to adopt measures against DNS abuse and ensure better security for users.

Finally, action is also planned through the GeoTLD Group this year to improve the universal acceptance of domains. At present there are still many e-commerce sites which don’t accept characters outside of the ASCII alphabet (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). This means that some websites still don’t accept non-English characters such as the Ç or the L·L. Similarly, these sites do not recognise domains with more than five letters. This issue directly affects domains such as .barcelona, .madrid, .amsterdam and others. In order to improve universal acceptance for domains, the GeoTLD Group are planning a series of promotional measures in this area and some meetings and technical training days for these websites.