A motion to establish a distinct extension for Quebec passed unanimously by National Assembly of Quebec in 2008. PointQuébec Inc was formed as a non profit by receiving support from the government of quebec (including a loan to help cover the $185K application fee) and all political parties in Quebec. Later on it applied for .quebec as part of the ICANN’s new gtld program and .quebec was born, Sunrise registrations started in Sep 2014 and the registry went live for public registration in Nov 2014. It was hoping to see the government websites adopt the new suffix; something that hasn’t happened yet.
In Sep 2018 www.quebec.ca was launched to become the official website for government of Quebec. The main website for the government of Quebec used to be gouv.qc.ca and still most of the legacy websites and email accounts are using gouv.qc.ca. CIRA the dot-ca registry launched its IDN program to allow french characters in domain name in 2013. The government of Quebec has registered Quebec.ca in Aug 2017 and Québec.ca in Mar 2018. At this time Québec.ca redirects to Quebec.ca.
According to publicly available data the total number of registered .quebec domains at the end of Mar 2019 was 8,900. The registry could be satisfied that the extension has survived and its growth is in line with most major city extensions such as .paris. (read it’s flat). Historical monthly registrations can be found here.
Quebec has a population of more than 8 millions. For .quebec the number of registered domains to population ratio is 0.1%. The comparable ratio for .paris is 1% and for .ca is 7.5%.
Can proponents of .quebec hope for a come back by government of Quebec in near future? Is .quebec registry sustainable considering the number of registrations?
