credit: Ana Bergmann
The letters following the dot in a Web address are called the suffix or TLD (Top-Level Domain). In recent years, the exponential growth of the Internet has made it necessary to introduce more and more of these suffixes to facilitate local and international on-line searches. Such TLDs may identify continents, geographic areas, cities, or organizations. This is what we call the territorialization of the Web.
Québec is on the leading edge of this movement. By using a Web address ending with .QUEBECrather than.COM or another generic suffix, companies, organizations, and individuals can reap the benefits of one of the most powerful tools for finding and being found on the Web.
A distinctive geographic suffix for a unique society
Suffixes associated with cities, states, or general geographic regions have a special status and are called geographic suffixes or GeoTLDs. Very few provinces, states, or cities have their own GeoTLD. In fact, Quebec is one of just five in all of the Americas!
Why not .QC ? Or .QUE ?
.QUEBEC, written out in full, in an e-mail address, for example, is more representative and better known throughout the world than .QC
And .QUE, could be confused with the Spanish word “que.”
In addition, according to the international rules established by ICANN, (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), only countries represented by the ISO 3166-1 standard may be granted two-letter suffixes. These are called ccTLD, or country code Top-Level Domains.
When will we have .QUÉBEC with an accent?
Web addresses currently use the ASCII format (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which cannot represent the accented characters used by Latin languages, including French, or other characters needed by Slavic and Asian languages, for example.
PointQuébec is one of the groups that are urging ICANN to create internationalized domain names.