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$10 million to move to a dot-brand? Quebec says “non”
Kevin Murphy,
November 17, 2014, 10:52:22 (UTC),
Domain Registries
One of the biggest hypothetical barriers to the adoption of dot-brand gTLDs has always been the likely cost of migration, but until now nobody’s really thrown around any figures.
The Government of Quebec has decided against rebranding to the forthcoming .quebec gTLD, saying the migration would cost it CAD 12 million ($10.6 million), according to local reports.
The Canadian Press press reported over the weekend that Quebec will still to its existing gouv.qc.ca addresses and therefore save itself a bundle of cash at a time when austerity measures are in place.
The timing of the revelation is unfortunate for PointQuebec, the .quebec registry, which is due to go to general availability tomorrow.
The application for .quebec, a protected geographic string under ICANN rules, was made with the support of the Canadian province.
The decision by the government is not a death sentence for the gTLD, but it is the loss of a significant anchor tenant at the worst possible moment.
It also highlights what we all already knew — for a large organization, changing your domain name is complicated and expensive.
Not only do myriad IT systems need to be migrated to the new domain, you also need to think about things as trivial as letter heads and signage.
The cost of such a switch is a key reason we’re unlikely to see many dot-brand owners making a full-scale switch to their new gTLD in the short term.
City new gtlds .london, .nyc, .vegas., .melbourne, .berlin and so on might bring negative perceptions because they are perceived as sub-domains because they break existing and accepted electronic nomenclature and syntax.
Certain mayors, for example Boris Johnson in London, or former mayors, for example Michael Bloomberg in New York, supporting new gtlds hope they are supporting their cities not realising there are negative perceptions. These have the potential to demote their first world city new gtlds into being perceived as a third world city. The city new gtlds do not have national governance .gov and/or the .cctld suffix at the end, it means therefore the city gtlds are into anarchy. Also the city gtlds imply they are a country inside a country and this obviously is unacceptable and ridiculous.
The government failed to grab quebec.com using UDRP early this year and now they won’t even want .quebec which they can fully control.
$10m? Come on. I guess they needed a heavy argument for not being burdened with this quite ressourceful task and on deadline. Yes, you need to make the correct 301 redirects, but even the most expensive consultants can do this at a fraction of the cost.
There’s more to a domain name than just a web site.
Sure. It could be interesting to break down the costs though, because 10m still seems very exaggerated and appears to be the excuse for a project manager, who might not see the benefits vs. the massive task