November 23, 2012
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has announced the .CA registry has reached 2 million domain names.
It's been a somewhat of a overnight success that's taken 25 years. After initially taking 21 years to hit one million .CA domain names registered, it took only 4 years for the second million registrations.
The milestone has a special significance for CIRA as it falls on the same year of .CA's 25th anniversary; which occurred in May this year.
As is the case with Australian domain name registration criteria, strict guidelines help maintain the integrity of and consumer trust in the .CA extension.
".CA is like having a Canadian flag on your digital backpack," says Byron Holland, President and CEO of CIRA., "It represents Canada on the Internet. And research shows Canadians prefer .CA sites for online news, banking and shopping. So it's no surprise our numbers continue to climb."
CIRA says the registry is the fourth fastest-growing and the fourteenth largest compared to other country specific domain names.
Canada's population is substantially larger than Australia's at 34 million - around 50% higher - but the .AU registry boasts over 2.5 million registrations. One of the reasons may be Canada's proximity to the USA - and with strong commercial ties to the USA and no restrictions on .com names; perhaps that has attracted a significant amount of Canadian registration business.
The first .CA domain name, upei.ca, was registered by the University of Prince Edward Island in 1988; some years before the World Wide Web existed. In fact, it wouldn't be until 1989 until Tim Berners-Lee published a paper call Information Management: A Proposal; which outlined how the World Wide Web would operate.
According to John Demco, who was involved with creating the .CA top level domain; back then there were only a few thousand computers in the world connected to the Internet.
While certainly an old-timer, upei.ca is by no means the oldest domain name - that distinction goes to nordu.net; which was registered on March 15, 1985.
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