| Quebec politician may seek domain name in vainThe Parti Quebecois's Daniel Turp starts a petition to get the province its own ".qc" for all French-Canadian Web sites, but CIRA says he may have overlooked an important rule in granting such addresses
By:
Briony Smith
ComputerWorld Canada
(18 Apr 2008)
| A Parti Quebecois member of Quebec's National Assembly announced this week his petition for a Quebec-specific “.qc” domain, despite the fact, according to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, that, under current laws, it would require that Quebec be deemed a country in its own right first. “You can’t just walk up and request one,” David Hicks, director of marketing and communications with the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, said. “It’s a fairly involved process.” It is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that doles these out, and they are governed by a large set of strict rules from the ISO. One of these is the ISO 31-66-1, which lays out the two-letter country codes as dictated by who the United Nations deems an official country. “There’s no .qc on there. And to get a two-letter code, you have to go to the standards body to get reclassified as a country,” said Hicks. Daniel Turp’s petition includes the statement that “Quebec and Quebec citizens should be able to endow themselves with their own identity and a visible presence on the map.” Petitioners would be, according to the petition, “in favor of the creation of a provincial extension, .qc, that would be unique to Quebec and that would be applicable to domain names of the first level.” It also argues that a precedent has been set by the autonomous Spanish region Catalonia, which has its own .cat domain. It was “established to serve the needs of the linguistic community and Catalan culture,” according to the petition. Currently, he said, the government intranet uses this designation already. Also, the petition points out, Quebec has higher Internet usage rates (at 71.5 per cent) than France (54.7 per cent), the United Kingdom (62.3 per cent), Canada as a whole (66 per cent) and the Swiss (67.8 per cent), according to a Centre francophone d'informatisation des organizations study. |
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| |  | Gee, Quebec has 71.5% of their population on the internet? Let's look at actual numbers rather than percentages. Quebec has 5.4 million people with the internet compared to 33.3 million for France. So somehow that justifies the ".qc"? Get real. | |
Written by: Chris Thorpe, from Waterloo | |
| | | If Mr Turp is really so adamant that Quebec should be a country, I think we should accede to his wishes partway.... send him back to his "ancestral" home and give Quebec to its aboriginal people.
Problem solved! | |
Written by: John Q. Public, from Paris | |
| | | Hopefully the ISO standards are enough to keep ICANN from folding and they can't be overidden by Quebec's notwithstanding clause. Otherwise it could set a bad precedent to allow states and provinces all over the world to request thier own top-level domain. | |
Written by: Brian, from Cambridge | |
| | | The ICANN rules are in place for good reason. Allowing Quebec to have this designation would open the flood gates to every Province, State, County and even municipalities demanding their own root domains. Intuitively finding an internet address by typing in a name and a dot com/net/ca/gov/etc. extension is hard enough already. Adding even more LESS intuitive root domains will only make that more difficult. Additionally, as a Western Canadian, I see this request as a lightly veiled attempt to try to further separate from the mainstream Canadian way of life, in this case via the internet. Just my own thoughts. | |
Written by: Bob Stabb, from Kelowna | |
| | | The ICANN rules are in place for good reason. Allowing Quebec to have this designation would open the flood gates to every Province, State, County and even municipalities demanding their own root domains. Intuitively finding an internet address by typing in a name and a dot com/net/ca/gov/etc. extension is hard enough already. Adding even more LESS intuitive root domains will only make that more difficult. Additionally, as a Western Canadian, I see this request as a lightly veiled attempt to try to further separate from the mainstream Canadian way of life, in this case via the internet. Just my own thoughts. | |
Written by: Bob Stabb, from Kelowna | |
| | | .cat is not a 2-lettter code, so I fail to see how Catalonia functions as a precedent. | |
Written by: Natasha, from Vancouver | |
| | | This is just another example of the ongoing French-Canadian arrogance on the part of the Parti Quebecois. They push our Feds around to get what they want and now they're attempted it with CIRA. Get over it, you lost the referendum vote!! You are still part of Canada, and should be damn privledged to use the .ca TLD. | |
Written by: Sal Seech, from St. Catharines | |
| | | It is at times like this that I miss Chretien. We need a say it as it is leader not some weak knee-ed pushover. | |
Written by: Izzie, from Richmond Hill | |
| | | Not all Quebecers/Quebeqois are fools. If all these speratists are so enamoured of exclusive French life let them move to France. In my opinion they are nothing but traitors and seditionists. Vive Canada! | |
Written by: Henri M, from Trois Riviers | |
| | | So what would become of .qc.ca, keep that too? Turff it? You'd think they could acknowledge that they are part of a country. While we're at it lets all get top level domain names, I call .YO, my chair is the capital of the country of YO, and we hold all coprights related to YO MAMA, YOYO and YO FROG GITALIFE. | |
Written by: Ian, from Halifax | |
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Specious Argument
RE: Specious Argument