Olivier Charbonneau, bibliothécaire professionnel et chercheur à l’Université Concordia, and blogger behind the excellent CultureLibre.ca [1], posts about a petition [2]started by Le député provincial de Mercier à Montréal, Daniel Turp, aiming to persuade ICANN to grant Quebec the top level domain designation “dot qc.”
Apparently the Deputy discovered that the semi-autonomous regions of Catalan and Greenland have their own dot suffixes.
The full list of top level domains is available on the IANA site [3]. .GL, Greenland’s code is listed as a “country code”; while .CAT is said to be “sponsored” and “Reserved for the Catalan linguistic and cultural community.” The only other regional “sponsored” domain is .ASIA, which is “Restricted to the Pan-Asia and Asia Pacific community.”
IANA [4] — the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority — is operated by and carries out the policies set by ICANN [5] — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which says it is “a not-for-profit partnership of people from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable.” ICANN is taking steps [6]to gain autonomy from the US Commerce Department, which currently oversees its operations.