A unique geographic suffix
Quebec now has its own suffix, at the same level as .com, .org, .net or .ca.
A suffix or TLD (Top Level Domain) corresponds to the termination of a domain name. The exponential growth of the Internet requires the introduction of more of these suffixes, including those corresponding to continents, geographic areas, cities or organizations, making it easier to search the local or global web. This is what we call the territorialization of the web.
Quebec is at the forefront of this great change. By using a domain name ending with the .QUEBEC suffix rather than a .COM or other generic suffix, companies, organizations and Internet users will benefit from one of the most powerful tools to be found on the Web.
Suffixes associated with geographic locations or regions have a special status and are called geographic suffixes or GeoTLDs. Few of the provinces, states or cities have obtained their own GeoTLD. Quebec is the only one in Canada, among the six GeoTLDs across Americas!
Why not .QC or .QUE?
Because, according to international rules established and managed since the early days of the Internet by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), only countries recognized by ISO 3166-1 are entitled to be assigned a suffix of only two letters. They are called ccTLD or country code Top-Level Domain.
As for .QUE, it could be confused with the Spanish word “que”. The .QUEBEC written in full, in an email address for example, is even more representative.
When will the .québec, with an accent be available?
Web addresses currently use the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) format which does not allow accented characters from Latin languages, including French, and other characters from Slavic or Asian languages, for example.
PointQuébec is one of the groups advocating for ICANN to create internationalized web addresses.
