Just as the 44th ICANN meeting in Prague ended yesterday, ICANN has opened  registration for the 45th ICANN meeting in Toronto, to be held Oct 14-19th 2012. Even though the site says “Prague is one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the world“, I’m pretty sure it’s still in Toronto with CIRA, the .CA registry being the host.

[Hat tip to Frank Lemire for noticing the copied text on the site.]

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.

As announced in a press release published today, Tucows (NYSE AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) has purchased all the shares of German registrar EPAG for approximately US$2.5 Million (€1.5 Million to purchase the shares and the settlement of a working capital adjustment of €0.25 Million) through an all-cash transaction.

EPAG, based in Bonn, Germany, is an ICANN-accredited registrar with over 400,000 domains under management and is notable for offering over 200 Top Level Domains (TLDs). Tucows plans to continue serving EPAG customers and resellers via existing EPAG tools and will also integrate EPAG’s domain services into its own OpenSRS wholesale domain registration service.

“We believe combining the power of OpenSRS’ 12,000 active resellers in over 120 countries with EPAG’s ability to register such a broad range of TLDs will make OpenSRS unique in the industry,” said Tucows President & CEO Elliot Noss. “We expect that the deep expertise in registry integration we gain from EPAG will add invaluable bench-strength to our team as we prepare for ICANN’s roll-out of new TLDs.”

See the full press release after the jump.

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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.

As announced by the organizers today, next week’s DomainConvergence conference has been postponed until May 2011. All sponsors and registered attendees have been informed by the organizers. The new date for the event is most likely going to be May 12/13th, 2011, but details are still pending confirmation with the venue, the Hotel Place D’Armes in Montreal, QC, Canada.

Disclaimer: Frank Michlick is chairman of the DomainConvergence Event and CEO of the company, DNEvents.com Inc., that organizes the event.

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…)

While the US state of Kentucky is fighting online gambling by seizing domain names, the Canadian Province of British Columbia has decided to try to get a part of the online gambling cake and was apparently overwhelmed by its success.

The British Columbia Lotter Corporation had launched its controversial online gambling site, PlayNow.com, last Thursday and was shut down by the initial spike of traffic.

“It’s been an overwhelming success with people in British Columbia to the point where we hit 100 per cent capacity in the first day,” Michael Graydon, president of the corporation, said Friday.

“So we decided to close the site down for a half a day, add some new hardware and servers to the system to be able to accommodate it. We’re in the process of doing that. Our IT people are working very hard to get it up and running.”

The site is still offline today. It will include casino games, bingo, sports, lotteries and other games and is expected to generate about $100 million in revenue.

[Via CBC]

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.
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Please note that the following is a parody intended for April Fools day 2009.

Canadian government officials confirmed with DNN that the government will be attending the upcoming Sydney ICANN meeting to block the progress of a proposed new CCTLD.  As previously reported, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing to have the .ca delegated to the state of California and .eh to become the new Canadian ccTLD.

The long standing battle over the new domain name extension came to a head this week as the Canadian government released their official statement. “In no way will we allow this travesty to occur”, explained Jean Luc Remole spokesperson for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Canadian domainers remain split. Loyalist leader and Dot Eh company President, Shaun Pilfod believes the group has a large enough following to turn the tables on this battle and help Schwarzenegger pass the reallocation. “We’re very proud Canadians and this confusion in the marketplaces needs to be fixed,” explained Pilfold.

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…)