Last month the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) finally re-designed its registration system and upgraded to EPP. The EPP system which is an industry standard, allows the registry to more effectively communicate with registrars and basically take itself out of the registration process and leave it in the hands of CIRA accredited registrars. Read More
The Montreal Gazette is reporting that CIRA has ended the possibility of registering third and fourth level .ca domains. An example are names ending with .on.ca or .qc.ca. These extensions were originally designated for provincial use (Ontario, Quebec). There are still websites on domains ending with these extensions and those sites will be able to keep and use those domains. CIRA will no longer make third and fourth level .ca extensions available for registration mainly because they are hardly being used as trends are moving away from these types of urls.
I just read on FavoriteDomains.com that CIRA is ready to restart it’s TBR (to be released) domains which is handled by Pool.com as of November 3rd. The TBR names have been backlogged since for over three weeks so you can expect a wealth of good .ca’s to be dropping soon.
* .CA domains recently eclipsed the 1.5 million registration mark
