The domain name registry that operates the .CA ccTLD, Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), announced today that the .CA domain is turning 25 years old. The very first .CA domain name was registered to the University of Prince Edward Island in 1988. Currently there are 1,925,775 domains registered under .CA.

It was on this day back in 1987 that the .CA domain extension was officially delegated by Jon Postel, operator of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), to John Demco at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Demco and a group of volunteers ran the .CA domain registry for 13 years. From 1987 to 2000, those volunteers at UBC registered almost 60,000 domain names. Since 2000, the registry for .CA domain names has been run by the Ottawa-based Canadian Internet Registration Authority. CIRA’s President and CEO Byron Holland said:

“We owe a debt to the visionaries who set up .CA in the 1980s. While many people today may take the Internet for granted, the fact is, without the foresight of people like John Demco, the Internet might not have developed as we now know it… The growth in both the size of the registry and in the role .CA plays in Canadians’ lives bodes well for the next 25 years of .CA. As we move more and more of our lives online, .CA is becoming the ‘flag on the virtual backpack’ for hundreds of thousands of Canadians.”

Back in 1987 when the .CA ccTLD was introduced the world wide web was a very different place. Very few Canadians were online, and until 1990 only governments and the academic community were able to register .CA domains. Today, .CA is an integral part of the Canadian economic and social landscape. Now with more than 1.9 million domain names registered, .CA is the world’s 14th-largest domain registry, and it has the fourth-highest growth rate over the past five years.

On April 15, 2008, CIRA registered it’s one millionth .CA domain name. The next big celebration is right around the corner it seems. In another few weeks give or take, they will be celebrating the two millionth .CA domain registration which will be another huge milestone for the Canadian ccTLD.

The registry has also just opened their nominations for their 2012 Board Elections.

CIRA, the .CA registry announced today that they published a Factbook about Domain Names on their site. The new site features information such as:

• History of Domain Names
• Current Domain Name Registration Statistics
• Information on registration trends and growth rates
• Statistics regarding the Canadian domain space
• Information on the Canadian Internet Economy

The registry will also be hosting the Canadian Internet Forum in the coming week (Feb 27th, 2012) in Ottawa.

While some of the .CA registrars are apparently still having problems with this morning’s switchover of the .CA registry to EPP, the registry appears to have successfully completed their migration. So what do the changes mean, aside from another backend protocol being used for registrars to connect to the registry?

• Registrants will now generally only deal with their registrars and not have to interact with CIRA directly.
• There are no more CIRA user IDs
• Domains are Auto-Renewed on a Registry level – just like COM/NET/ORG the registry now automatically renews the domain at the expiry date and charges the registrar account. It is to be expected that registrars will however delete any domains that are not set to auto-renew on the registrar level, just like for the gTLDs.
• New 3rd and 4th level domains are no longer supported with the exception of 4th level municipal domains. Existing 3rd and 4th level domains will be grandfathered.
• Registrars can now offer their own whois privacy system for individual registrants.
• The number of contacts per domain is now limited and not maintained across registrars.
• New Data used to validate Canadian Presence Requirements (CPR) will be required in 2011.
• Domains can only be transferred to another registrars 60 days after their initial registration or a previous transfer.
• An ownership change of a domain does not require a renewal of the domain name any more.
• “Critical changes” are now processed immediately.

As part of the switchover the registry operator also temporarily disabled the domain deletions, which were usually happening once a week. The process is going to restart on November 3rd, 2011.

Zak Muscovitch at DomainConvergence 2008

Guest contributor Zak Muscovitch is a domain name lawyer, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has been practicing domain name law for over ten years and is now running for the election for a seat on the CIRA Board of Directors. Go to http://www.DNattorney.com and http://zak-for-cira.ca/ for more information.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (“CIRA”) operates Canada’s .CA domain name registry in the “public interest”. Where does this authority come from and what is the “public interest”? During the current 2010 election for CIRA’s Board of Directors, these questions should be raised and debated. CIRA has an important role to fill as the operational manager of the registry, but has an equally important role to fill in terms of governing the .CA space in the public interest.

Read the full article after the jump. (more…)

We will be live blogging blogged the auction results at the Targeted TRAFFIC Vancouver .CA Live Auction in Vancouver. As always we do not guarantee the accuracy of these results.

According to our numbers 18 of 53 (34%) domains sold for a grand total of $263,050 with the top sale of the geo-domain Surrey.com pulling in $195,000.

See the full unofficial auction results after the jump.
(more…)

Guest contributor Zak Muscovitch is a domain name lawyer, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has been practising domain name law for ten years. Go to http://www.DNattorney.com and http://www.muscovitch.com.

Privacy Protection for domainers who have legitimate portfolios is a little like a burka on a bikini model.

Although keeping one’s domain name registration details private is an attractive concept and may even help wary registrants avoid imparting too much information to prospective domain name dispute claimants, in my humble opinion, the practice is a business killer in the .CA realm. As a domain name lawyer I can rarely find out who owns what to try and put together deals. I can’t trace the history of domains to perform due diligence. I can’t identify connections between web sites and domain owners. It stymies me. And if it stymies me from doing .CA deals, that means that it is hurting business for .CA owners , who dont need any more negative factors affecting the Canadian market than they already have. Sure I can sometimes use other methods, but the utility of domaintools.com whois archives is lessening as time goes on, because it carries no new information for most .ca’s since all recent records are privacy protected.

By way of background, CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority made privacy protection a “default setting” [ed. for individual registrants], and considered this move a leadership position in the Internet world. And I did too. I am a big fan of privacy and thought that CIRA’s privacy protection policy was extraordinarily progressive and consumer-friendly. But I was wrong. It kills business. Imagine a stock exchange where there are no listings….That is what has happened here. And the benefit of privacy is nil for a domainer who is trying to hide, because there a CDRP [ed:.CA Dispute Resolution Policy] reveals your identity anhow….and hiding can actually encourage a CDRP…So it gets you nowhere other than to avoid someone like me finding out what domain name you own so I can easily contact you and know who you are, to make a deal.

In the Canadian .CA realm, domains are extraordinarily underdeveloped so we need all the contact and attention that we can get – not privacy! We dont want a marketplace with hidden vendors. We want a marketplace with vendors showing their wares off in public and making themselves available to bargain with each other.

The University of British Columbia has honored John Demco, a former UBC computing facilities manager, for creating the .ca domain registry that gave Canada an online identity. The Demco Student Learning Centre in the Dept. of Computer Sciences will be named on his behalf.

Demco started the .ca registry in 1987 and managed a group of volunteers to take care of domain applications – registering nearly 100,000 .ca domain names before CIRA, a not-for-profit corporation, took full control of the process. (more…)

For the past six or so months, Tech Vibes has been ranking Canadian startup companies by averaging their Alexa and Compete.com rankings.

Previously they were doing it on a city-by-city basis, but this month opted for the Canada Startup Index.

As a Canadian I see a lot of anecdotal evidence that .ca is gaining in popularity. It is becoming more and more common to see billboards, TV ads, hear radio ads, and other ad mediums mention a domain with .ca at the end.

But what is interesting is that the entire list is dominated by .COM. We have the random ‘.us’ at #9, but all others from #1 to #18 are purely ‘.com’

And for those that may argue that Compete and Alexa skew American-centric … we also have ComScore’s numbers for Canada. Only one out of the top 14 is a .ca.

MyID is currently running their .CA domain auction. Bids have to be place by June 26th, 2008. The list of domains that have reached their reserve after the break. (more…)

Image via Wikipedia

Cafe.ca, a premium Canadian domain name, will be re-auctioned by Pool with no reserve. But you must backorder the domain name if you want to participate in the auction – which starts tomorrow, June 11, at 4:00 p.m. EDT.

Pool has been offering one premium .ca domain for auction each month since April, after Sibername canceled their monthly .ca auction. Cafe.ca was the first domain they auctioned, but the reserve price wasn’t met. Following a successful sale of Dates.ca for $18,353 (USD), Pool decided to re-run Cafe.ca without a reserve price, meaning the domain name is guaranteed to sell regardless of the final bid. MyId.ca also is running premium .ca auctions, the current one scheduled to end Thursday (June 12th).

The auction is scheduled to end on Monday, June 16, 2008, at 12:00 p.m. EDT.