.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) |
| Registry website | CIRA |
.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).
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 TLD's.
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 « .ça » 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.