Information about .ca

**.ca**
CIRA - Canadian Internet Registration Authority
Introduced	1987
TLD type	Country code top-level domain
Status	Active
Registry	Canadian Internet Registration Authority
Sponsor	None
Intended use	Entities connected with Canada
Actual use	Fairly popular in Canada, where .ca is advantageous when selling to a Canadian audience in Canadian dollars. Often, .com domains remain preferred in manufacturing and export trade.
Registration restrictions	There are Canadian presence requirements for registrants
Structure	Provincially-registered companies originally had to register at third level under province code, but now anybody may register at second level
Documents	Official CIRA documents
Dispute policies	CIRA Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (CDRP)
Web site

.ca is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Canada. Registrants of .ca domains must meet Canadian Presence Requirements as defined by the registry. Examples of valid entities include:

a Canadian citizen of the age of majority,
a permanent resident of Canada,
a legally recognized Canadian organization,
an Inuit, First Nation, Métis or other people indigenous to Canada,
an Indian Band as defined in the Indian Act of Canada,
a foreign resident of Canada that holds a registered Canadian trademark,
An executor, administrator or other legal representative of a person or organization that meets the requirements,
a division of the government,
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Registrants can either register domains at the second level (e.g. example.ca) or at the third level in one of the geographic second-level domains defined by the registry (e.g. example.ab.ca).

History

The domain name was originally allocated by Jon Postel, operator of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), to John Demco of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1988.

In 1997, at the Canadian annual Internet conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Canadian Internet community, with a view to liberalize registration procedures and substantially improve turnaround times, decided to undertake reform of the .ca Registry.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is a non-profit Canadian corporation that is responsible for operating the .ca Internet country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) today. It assumed operation of the .ca ccTLD on December 1, 2000 from UBC.

Any .ca registration has to be ordered via a certified registrar.

Second-level domains

UBC's registry operations once favoured fourth-level names (such as city.toronto.on.ca) for purely-local entities or third-level names for entities operating solely within one province. Federally incorporated companies could have a .ca domain, while provincially incorporated companies required the letters of their province, like .mb.ca. Only an entity with presence in two or more provinces was typically registered directly under .ca; this complex structure (and the long delays in getting .ca registration) caused many Canadian entities to favour the .com, .org and .net registrations, despite the then-higher cost.

Currently, any of the above listed parties can register a domain with a name of their choosing followed directly by .ca, with the following second-level domains existing primarily as a historical artifact from the time before CIRA managed the .ca domain:

.ab.ca — Alberta
.bc.ca — British Columbia
.mb.ca — Manitoba
.nb.ca — New Brunswick
.nf.ca — Newfoundland (no longer accepting new registrations, replaced by .nl.ca)
.nl.ca — Newfoundland and Labrador
.ns.ca — Nova Scotia
.nt.ca — Northwest Territories
.nu.ca — Nunavut
.on.ca — Ontario
.pe.ca — Prince Edward Island
.qc.ca — Quebec
.sk.ca — Saskatchewan
.yk.ca — Yukon

N.B. The second-level domain name '.gc.ca' is commonly mistaken as one of the regional domains under which CIRA will allow Government of Canada registrations. gc.ca is actually a standard domain like all other .ca domain names. CIRA does not register domain names under .gc.ca directly. The .mil.ca second-level domain name is also a standard domain like all others; while not currently in use, it is registered to DND (where dnd.ca redirects to forces.gc.ca).

Naming restrictions

In preparation for the implementation of Internationalized Domain Names(IDN), domain names that begin with the four characters xn-- are not available for registration.

Names which match the name of an existing top-level domain, such as com.ca or ca.ca, are reserved and therefore not available for new registrations. Certain expletives are not accepted as names and the municipal names of individual cities and localities within Canada are also reserved nationwide.

Oddly, all of these names are reserved both at second and third-level, although entities with existing registrations (such as St. Lawrence College's sl.on.ca) are able to retain them. There are a handful of existing .ca registered names as short as two characters in length, but these tend to be rare as many two-letter combinations match the names of existing country-code TLDs.

Names which exist at any of the levels (.ca or an individual province or territory) are restricted in their availability elsewhere in the .ca hierarchy. Registration, if it can be done at all, requires manual intervention by the prospective registrar and the permission of all existing registrant(s) must be obtained by CIRA.

For instance, if the province of New Brunswick were to want "gouv.nb.ca"? CIRA's normal automated whois and registration tools would simply return an error: "Le domaine: gouv.nb.ca n'est pas disponible, il existe 3 des noms d'autres niveaux: gouv.on.ca: gouv.pe.ca: gouv.qc.ca:". Since Ontario, Québec and PEI already have ".gouv" for the French-language versions of their government sites, this domain is unavailable through the normal registration process.

Expired « .ca » names

After a thirty-day redemption period, intended to provide the original registrant one final chance to reclaim a suspended name, the expired names are assigned a to-be-released (TBR) status. These names are made available through a weekly auction process, in which lists of available names are posted online^[1] and advance bids are placed by prospective registrants through the various .ca registrars.

Domains which receive no bids are then released and made openly available for new registrations.

References

1. ^ CIRA TBR process

External links

• • [ e] Country code top-level domains
Active: .ac .ad .ae .af .ag .ai .al .am .an .ao .aq .ar .as .at .au .aw .ax .az .ba .bb .bd .be .bf .bg .bh .bi .bj .bm .bn .bo .br .bs .bt .bw .by .bz .ca .cc .cd .cf .cg .ch .ci .ck .cl .cm .cn .co .cr .cu .cv .cx .cy .cz .de .dj .dk .dm .do .dz .ec .ee .eg .er .es .et .eu .fi .fj .fk .fm .fo .fr .ga .gd .ge .gf .gg .gh .gi .gl .gm .gn .gp .gq .gr .gs .gt .gu .gw .gy .hk .hm .hn .hr .ht .hu .id .ie .il .im .in .io .iq .ir .is .it .je .jm .jo .jp .ke .kg .kh .ki .km .kn .kr .kw .ky .kz .la .lb .lc .li .lk .lr .ls .lt .lu .lv .ly .ma .mc .md .mg .mh .mk .ml .mm .mn .mo .mp .mq .mr .ms .mt .mu .mv .mw .mx .my .mz .na .nc .ne .nf .ng .ni .nl .no .np .nr .nu .nz .om .pa .pe .pf .pg .ph .pk .pl .pn .pr .ps .pt .pw .py .qa .re .ro .ru .rw .sa .sb .sc .sd .se .sg .sh .si .sk .sl .sm .sn .sr .st .sv .sy .sz .tc .td .tf .tg .th .tj .tk .tl .tm .tn .to .tr .tt .tv .tw .tz .ua .ug .uk .us .uy .uz .va .vc .ve .vg .vi .vn .vu .wf .ws .ye .yu .za .zm .zw
Reserved/unassigned: .eh .kp .me .rs .um Allocated/unused: .bv .gb .pm .sj .so .yt Phaseout: .su .tp Deleted/retired: .cs .zr
See also: Generic top-level domains

19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s 1960s 1970s - 1980s - 1990s 2000s 2010s
1984 1985 1986 - 1987 - 1988 1989 1990

Year 1987 (MCMLXXXVII
..... Click the link for more information.

A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country or a dependent territory.

ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs.
..... Click the link for more information.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) (French: Autorité canadienne pour les enregistrements Internet ACEI) is a non-profit Canadian corporation that is responsible for operating the .ca country code top-level domain.
..... Click the link for more information.

This page is currently protected from editing until disputes have been resolved.
Protection is not an endorsement of the current [ version] ([ protection log]).
..... Click the link for more information.

.com

Introduced 1985
TLD type Generic top-level domain
Status Active
Registry VeriSign
Sponsor None
Intended use Commercial entities (worldwide)
Actual use Used for virtually any commercial or non-commercial website and is generally accepted as the standard
..... Click the link for more information.

Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government
..... Click the link for more information.

Country codes are short alphabetic or numeric geographical codes (geocodes) developed to represent countries and dependent areas, for use in data processing and communications. Several different systems have been developed to do this. The most famous of these is ISO 3166-1.
..... Click the link for more information.

top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of an Internet domain name; that is, the letters which follow the final dot of any domain name. For example, in the domain name www.example.
..... Click the link for more information.

Canadian citizenship may be granted to any person by the Governor General, on the advice of the Cabinet,^[1] however it is typically obtained by birth in Canada (other than as a child of a foreign diplomat), by birth abroad, when at least one parent is a Canadian
..... Click the link for more information.

The age of majority is the threshold of adulthood as it is conceptualized in law. It is the chronological moment when children legally assume majority control over their persons and their actions and decisions, thereby terminating the legal control and legal responsibilities of
..... Click the link for more information.

A Permanent Resident in Canada is someone who is not a Canadian citizen and who has been granted permission to live and work in Canada without any time limit on his or her stay. A permanent resident must live in Canada for two years out of every five or risk losing that status.
..... Click the link for more information.

Editing of this page by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled due to vandalism.
If you are prevented from editing this page, and you wish to make a change, please discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or .
..... Click the link for more information.

First Nations is a Canadian term of ethnicity which refers to the aboriginal peoples located in what is now Canada, and their descendants who are neither Inuit nor Métis. Lest the descriptive First Nations imply the only First Peoples, it is important to recognize that the Inuit
..... Click the link for more information.

Métis (pronounced "MAY tee", IPA: ['mejti], in French [me'tis] or [me'tsɪs]
..... Click the link for more information.

The Indian Act ("An Act respecting Indians"), R.S., 1985, c. I-5, is Canadian statute that concerns registered Indians (that is, First Nations peoples of Canada), their bands, and the system of Indian reserves.
..... Click the link for more information.

Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary;<ref name="sur" /> born 21 April 1926) is the Queen regnant of sixteen independent states and their overseas territories and dependencies.
..... Click the link for more information.

Jonathan Bruce Postel (/pə'stɛl/; 6 August 1943 – 16 October 1998) made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly in the area of standards.
..... Click the link for more information.

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the entity that oversees global IP address allocation, DNS root zone management, and other Internet protocol assignments. It is operated by ICANN.
..... Click the link for more information.

The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Canadian public research university with campuses in Vancouver and Kelowna. UBC is rated as one of Canada’s top universities.
..... Click the link for more information.

19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s 1960s 1970s - 1980s - 1990s 2000s 2010s
1985 1986 1987 - 1988 - 1989 1990 1991

Year 1988 (MCMLXXXVIII
..... Click the link for more information.

20th century - 21st century
1960s 1970s 1980s - 1990s - 2000s 2010s 2020s
1994 1995 1996 - 1997 - 1998 1999 2000

Year 1997 (MCMXCVII
..... Click the link for more information.

Halifax Regional Municipality
(HRM)
Halifax, Nova Scotia

Coat of arms
Logo
Motto: "E Mari Merces" (Latin)
"From the Sea, Wealth"
..... Click the link for more information.

Nova Scotia
Nouvelle-Écosse, Alba Nuadh

Flag Coat of arms
Motto: Munit Haec et Altera Vincit (Latin)
"One defends and the other conquers"
..... Click the link for more information.

December 1 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events

800 - Charlemagne judges the accusations against Pope Leo III in the Vatican.

..... Click the link for more information.

A domain name registrar is a company accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and/or by a national ccTLD authority to register Internet domain names. These "retail" companies are often distinct from the "wholesale" domain name registry operator.
..... Click the link for more information.

.org

Introduced 1985
TLD type Generic top-level domain
Status Active
Registry Public Interest Registry (operated by Afilias)
Sponsor Not technically sponsored, but PIR is connected with the Internet Society
..... Click the link for more information.