Thursday, November 20, 2014

History of Internet domains


Is this gonna be huge in Quebec?
There must be a dedicated market for this one among all the new top-level domains becoming available.

The Parti Quebecois is already www.PQ.org, natch -- PQ.ca would be awkward! -- but one can imagine a change there pretty quickly. And surely a lot of much less political institutions will be happy enough to move away from dot.ca or dot.qc.ca to dot.quebec.  At one time unles you could demonstrate "national" significance, you had to take dot.on.ca, or dot.bc.ca, or whatever.That died quite a while ago, about the time CIRA, the agency that handles this, got serious about marketing domain names.

I wrote a little a few years ago on the history of dot.ca. And I kinda like dot.quebec. Apparently no one is offering dot.Alberta yet. It remains notable that dot.us is almost the only national domain in the world with almost no takeup. World wide web, meet Planet America.

 
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