According to ici.radio-canada.ca, the Government of Quebec has decided to end its participation in the new gTLD .Quebec, just days before .Quebec launches.
According to the story the Government has decided not to change Government websites to .Quebec and will instead retain all of its Website to end in .gouv.qc.ca .
The Government told the The Canadian Press on Friday that the migrating of all the Governmental websites to .Quebec would have cost $12 million of public funds and “In the context of budget cuts, it was found in Quebec that the cost of such a web migration was too high.”
“The news will no doubt be received as a cold shower by PointQuébec organization, which is the company that is operating .Quebec registry.
.Quebec new gTLD goes live on Tuesday, November 18, but now without the expected support of the government”
The story goes on to say that since 2008, Quebec had already invested $ 1.6 million into .Quebec
“But after analyzing recent months, it was concluded that an additional investment of nearly $12 million needed to move forward, not a wise use of public funds.
In a letter obtained by The Canadian Press on Monday sent to all deputy ministers and heads of agencies, the associate general secretary for government communications, Christian Lessard, written after analysis of financial and technological impacts, the government decided “not to migrate at this time to .quebec and maintain the standard as gouv.qc.ca.”
Despite this disclaimer, and in order to protect “the integrity of the Government of Quebec on the Internet”, it was agreed by the Executive Board to block certain numerical addresses that can not be used by others. It is the following addresses: “gouv.quebec”, “gov.quebec”, “gouvernement.quebec”, “gqc.quebec”, “gouvqc.quebec” and “gouvdu.quebec.””
So the questions now becomes can a Geographic new gTLD get adoption of the residents and the businesses of the area when the underlying Government is unwilling to spend the money to convert and use the extension itself?
(Note that the original story was published in French and translated to English using Google Translate”
Thats gotta leave a mark
well it makes sense. there is little to no benefit for the quebec government to switch. changing only benefited the registry.
Actually is makes NO SENSE to me. How would cost $12M to change a few links?? I’m sure there’s a bunch of costs in there associated with changing printed materials and graphics, but you can redirect all the old traffic to the new .quebec and going forward just publish the .quebec sites at an incremental cost of ZERO
These people are idiots
I’m sure there is more to it than that. changing numerous software programs that have no doubt been used for decades, re-routing intranets province-wide. changing job bank computers, etc, etc, etc.
No, there really isn’t. It’s as simple as changing a single entry in the .qc.ca DNS zone file to reditect to .quebec. You can pay an employee to do every domain in less than a day
I am thinking they just got cold feet and wanted to pull back, and rationalized by inventing 12 mill number. nycx makes a good point, its relatively easy to move website. Its pretty routine procedure. Emails would be pain in the butt, but still not expensive. They probably just didn’t want to go trough all the jumps. It did make it worse for quebec extension, because the city have committed first and then pulled back. Which looks way worse then if city just supported it.
I think it still will do fine, mainly because it only has .com and .ca as key extensions. There is no .Com .Eu .De as in the case of .Berlin in the mix. The less gtlds there is sandwiched between .com and city extension, the more likely it is to do well in long term. Regardless of the length of city name. Shortness is a bonus, not a requirement.
Lets take a sample of .London .Quebec .Berlin and .NYC
Berlin has it worst.
It has .Com .Eu .De plus its primary language is German as barriers. Language adding more to the confusion of which name to pick and who to target.
.Quebec is second worst after berlin. It has .com and .ca . While it doesnt have .Eu , it does have 2 language split French and english muddying water. Plus .ca is very short while. quebec is very long, hence making it even worse as trade off for the business. (i also feel that people will misspell qubeck with k)
.Londong is second best , due to .com and .co.uk . No .EU to muddy water, and its purely English speaking. Main issue is, .co.uk is pretty heavily used hence there is country code competition. BUt because .co.uk is pretty long, it doesnt suffer from it like quebec does.
.Nyc is best , simply because .US is lame duck and never used. With it, its only has to deal with .com and its English speaking. No split in languages. Its short and more descriptive then .com
That’s my theory
if you think all they need to do is change websites that residents access, you’re very wrong. regardless i’m not going to waste my time explaining it. that’s what you want to believe so go right ahead.
There is a lot that can be done, but obviously .qc.ca websites can be redirected ti their .quebec analog very easily. The old websites would work as usual and it would cost the government absolutely NOTHING, let alone 12 million
To paraphrase Orson Welles “we shall sell no GTLDs before their time” only question then is when is GTLD time? When a gov’t institution votes neigh the GTLD program absorbs a major blow IMO. Entrepreneurs creativity, passion, desires, and expectation aside, the powers that be have spoken and the answer for GTLDs acceptance is a resounding “Not now, Not us”.
Except there would be no registry without the government agreeing to the application in the first place.
As a Quebecker, I’ve never believed in .quebec. Most of the people I’ve told about .quebec asked me if it was a .QC. They even tough it was .quebec.com. Also, the price of the .quebec is too expensive for most of us. People are alerady complaining about the registration fee and the domain extension isn’t out yet! Witch means that here in quebec, we aren’t ready to pay more for a .quebec when many .com and .ca are still available for registration. To give you an idea, I’ve register MenuQuebec .com not a long time ago this year. Local businesses prefer a smart domain names in trusted extensions.
I also think that is a smart thing the government have done. Quebeckers pockets are sensible. Just think about Quebec’s schoolar fees.http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests.