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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: the original story was published in French and translated to English using Google Translate.
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This is about the saddest thing I have EVER heard.
If done smart it wouldn’t have cost the Government a CENT.
I am planning city TLD’s since exactly a decade now - and my offer to city governments has always been:
“You get up to 5,000 domains free of charge - they just should be routed to existing webspaces (websites - NOT domain based URLs) - so that city.org.ccTLD/police/911 and 911.city are BOTH routed to the same webspace (IP) and NOT the .city domain routed to the .cctld domain.
Costs the city nil - and the .city operator has very good brand awareness.
But having dealt with several cities myself I must admit that the responsible people there are not necessarily competent - nor do they necessarily care about the well being of the City or its inhabitants.
Alexander.berlin
@michael
Interesting article timing, given that they launch today. Ouch. I found this which is an entirely different perspective from Cirque du Soliel.
I tracked down the registry operator to clarify what the issue was with the govt. Though the govt announced that they would not rebrand everything (purely budget tightening), they did not withdraw their required support of the applicant’s geographic string.
@alexander
Your robust effort in the TLD space is remarkable and obviously inspired many - and what you describe is a generous structure very similar to what many other city TLD “pitchers” have set with or are presenting currently. The real challenge here is that Quebec is not a city so the structures of associated gratis names are really different.