It is really sad to see no standardization of international domains. Its a pity that there is no established convention :(

RC, does the fact that each country has its own conventions really matter?

The best convention of all is to use ".com" for everything. The internet is global, after all.

And until when we had to wait until google.cat will arrive?

I imagine what RC meant is that we have variations like:
.de
.co.uk
.com.sg
.us.com
and of course .com

Thanks for the link back :)

It seems to be used by the Google Desktop update checking system, I found in the internet logs at work.