MONTREAL — A Parti Quebecois member of the national assembly is trying to drum up support to create a distinct Quebec identity on the World Wide Web.

Daniel Turp has started a petition to convince the ICANN, the international authority responsible for Internet domain names, to create an extension that would be unique to websites in Quebec.

Turp says one way to identify a nation is for it to have its own web extensions and that if his efforts are successful, Quebecers would use the extension .qc.

He says Quebec already has a number of symbols like its own flag and the sovereignist just wants the Internet to reflect the reality of Quebec.

Turp points out that Catalonia, an autonomous region in Spain, has its own national extension -.cat, while the same goes for Greenland, a self-governing province in Denmark which uses .gl.

Quebecers now use the extension .qc.ca, which indicates a website is a Canadian website.