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The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) "has committed to the full deployment of DNSSEC, the security extensions for DNS, and has been conducting extensive research and analysis into the technical and operational impact of signing the dot-ca (.ca) zone file. The roll-out is anticipated in the later part of 2010."

CIRA is already providing a DNSSEC test bed for those interested in signing their own dot-ca name or interacting with a name server serving the signed dot-ca zone file.

for details see https://registrants.cira.ca/dnssec/login

Oh, and I forgot to mention, in addition to the requirements placed on registrants, CIRA also has a set of rules for registrars. Of interest is item 2.1:

Canadian Presence Requirements. Applicants must meet the requirements of CIRA's Canadian Presence Requirements for Registrants (located at www.cira.ca/en/document/CPR.pdf).

So, not only did you violate the terms of the registrant agreement, but godaddy is also not doing their diligence to ensure they are enforcing the presence requirements. 'course, it may be that godaddy will eventually come around and revoke your registration... if not, it might be grounds for having them reported to CIRA.

I think, correct me if I am wrong, what you're saying is, by registering this domain, I agree to be bound by the CIRA?

Correct. Specifically, by registering a .ca domain, you are bound by CIRA's Registrant Agreement, which, among other things, includes the Canadian Presence Requirements. Violating those requirements will result in the cancellation of your domain name registration (assuming you're caught, of course... odds are Facebook would be).

I think, correct me if I am wrong, what you're saying is, by registering this domain, I agree to be bound by the CIRA?

Correct. Specifically, by registering a .ca domain, you are bound by CIRA's Registrant Agreement, which, among other things, includes the Canadian Presence Requirements. Violating those requirements will result in the cancellation of your domain name registration (assuming you're caught, of course... odds are Facebook would be).

We already have .CA and its fairly well-managed too. We don't have all those strange domain hijackings and hijinx going on here because of how the registration system is managed.

CIRA accounts are set up in two sections:

1) The actual account that holds your contact/ownership information (this account is generally referred to as your CIRA ID).

2) The "membership" account, which is to be able to do things outside of normal domain ownership, such as vote on CIRA board elections (details at https://member.cira.ca/en/index.html)

The CIRA ID is assigned when you register your first .ca domain (although you can have many, ask your registrar for details), and is based off the contact information you provided to your registrar. You buy the domain, then get a temporary CIRA ID to go to CIRA's website and confirm your details. They then e-mail you a permanent username and password (alphanumerical fun, and you can't change them). If you change your contact details through your registrar, you have to go to CIRA's site, log in, and confirm the change within the next 7 days, or they don't take effect. All .ca domains under a single CIRA ID share their contact information, no matter what registrars you buy them through (just make sure they link the same CIRA ID to your account before you start buying).

The membership used to be a yes/no option in the CIRA ID details when you logged in at CIRA's website, but they changed it last year. I went through the process to see how difficult it was, as I was working in a .ca registrar's customer service at that time. So you fill out a form, send it in with a photocopy of a driver's license, and they send you a letter by mail with details for going to their site and confirming. That's it. If you want to update the information, you send in another form. A web-based form for updating the information would be lovely, and probably will get put in eventually due to demand.

If you've got many .ca domains and have problems updating your information, talk to your registrar(s). Get all your domains moved into one CIRA ID, either by a change of ownership or a "merge" of CIRA accounts.

I call bullshit, on absolutly everything you've said. I've had multpile .ca domains myself, and been responsible for many others over the years, and have never had to go through anything even remotely what you're describing.

Well, you should check again with CIRA. Here are their PDF forms, and pay attention to the part where they want government photoID:

This is the form for individuals.

This is the form for Non-Individuals (e.g.: Canadian Corporation).

So, I'm clearly not bullshitting. Do you have anything intelligent to add to the discussion?

I call bullshit, on absolutly everything you've said. I've had multpile .ca domains myself, and been responsible for many others over the years, and have never had to go through anything even remotely what you're describing.

Well, you should check again with CIRA. Here are their PDF forms, and pay attention to the part where they want government photoID:

This is the form for individuals.

This is the form for Non-Individuals (e.g.: Canadian Corporation).

So, I'm clearly not bullshitting. Do you have anything intelligent to add to the discussion?

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) will implement a new WHOIS policy in March to comply with Canadian privacy laws (particularly PIPEDA).

Perhaps they would, but that still doesn't explain why any old resident of France, Russia, Iraq, Jamaica, Papa New Guinea or Mongolia would need to get a .uk. Without huge amounts of paper work then there's never going to be any way that you can stop all registrations that aren't applicable under a rule set, but you can certainly reduce it by making it more effort to dissuade the lazier registrants.

Also, there may be 5m 'ex-pats', but how many of them want to own .uk domains? and how many are more elderly people who have no interest in technology retired abroad for the sun (mainly Spain)? and how many of those who do want .uk domains don't have a family member who they can use as the registrant contact if they were to check .uk domains were British residents?

As I said, Canada manages it somehow so it must be possible.

It also seems fairer to have 60 million potential registrants have access to the domains they want for their own country TLD with the side effect that 5 million potential registrants (a number less than 10% of the residential population) have to have family in the country or similar to register a .uk compared to having 60 million potential registrants possibly not able to get the domain of their choice in the TLD of the country of their residence because one of the approx 6,613,900,000 other potential registrants in the world (who are 11,000% of the number of residents) got to it first.

(Yes, I know the numbers also include children and babies, but it is easier to estimate off pure populations).

Other countries with residency requirements (some I thought of and quickly checked and skimmed): .us, .ca, .fr and I'm sure there's more (IIRC .dk might have requirements, but I've spent enough time hunting around various sites). .de allows non-residents to register, but you have to have a real German administrative contact address for them to server documents to. Those were the only ones I checked and all have residency checks or limitations of some degree.

Volpe's acceptance of these contributions was widely mocked and derided. The website cited in this thread was launched, and got a fair bit of coverage online.

Mr. Volpe subsequently decided to return the donations given by these kids. At about the same time, the website above had its DNS record SUSPD for one of many reasons (the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, CIRA cited a different reason in a press release (failure to provide valid Canadian contact information, as required by CIRA rules for a ".ca" domain) than that apparently given to the domain registrant (disrepute).

The interesting questions I find are (1) how influential were Volpe's minions in getting this site quashed, given that he was a member of the former Liberal government and CIRA operates under the authority of the Canadian Governmental department Industry Canada, and (2) what due process rights does any (".ca") domain owner have, given the speed with which this process executed (especially in light of all the legal expertise which is present on CIRA's board of directors, apparently not even bothering to ask for any court order or proper investigation against this site).

Some updates have come in, and apparently there has been no censorship of any kind whatsoever. The registrants provided false contact information, and Canadian registrars require valid contact information.

A CIRA news release on the subject contains some non-rumour info. Basically: it was the register, not CIRA; the domain was cancelled because it wasn't properly registered.

According to a few of the news sources he did not even know who owned the site, which is interesting because I found out fairly quickly with a whois:

Subdomain: youthforvolpe.ca
Renewal-Date: 2007/05/31
Date-Approved: 2006/05/31
Date-Modified: 2006/06/01
Organization: Mike Hunt
Description:
Admin-Name: Mr Mike Hunt
(-snip-)

So, this domain was up for approximately 2 days before it was nuked by the registrar, this was clearly a very bad move by Volpe - or at least I hope it turns out to be. As a Canadian, and one who owns a .ca domain no less, this behaviour is intolerable.

Due to the way Canadian politics works, I expect that a firestorm will start brewing over this. I doubt it will get swept under the rug, even though it involves technology that many MP's do not understand. And if it does get swept aside, I will be one of the Canadians that will not let it rest. It is not often that my government, or a member of it does something that motivates me to stand up as a citizen, and challenge it. (And, I am quite happy about that I might add.)

I hope that this stink damages Joe Volpe's position because his actions are clearly unacceptable. (But, I am not aware if they are actually illegal in Canada, although they should be.)

NOTE:

Having said all that, a poster on my blog provided the following link to the CIRA.CA story which claims that the CIRA did NOT have any contact with Joe Volpe or his staff. Again, one has no way of knowing if this is true. If it is just a concidence, then of course I withdraw my remarks about Volpe, but we just don't know the truth at this time.

(I also blogged about this too: Canadian .ca Censorship - And yeah, slashdot makes it a rel-nofollow so I am not link whoring it...)

You thought wrong (warning, PDF). You basically have to provide a Canadian address and choose one of the eligible categories from a drop down box.

That's CIRA.

...a nice, tidy, cut-and-dry violation of the Canadian telecommunications regulations act.

They do regulate telecommunications companies and there was a recent kerfuffle over the fact that telcos offering VoIP were regulated while cable companies and pure internet companies are not. http://digitalhomecanada.com/index.php?option=com_ content&task=view&id=531&Itemid=51

Cira regulates the ".ca" DNS registration. http://www.cira.ca/ but I don't think they regulate any other part of the internet in Canada.

SFAIK there isn't any internet regulations in Canada. Various laws like copyright and libel still apply but there's nothing specific covering the internet. Please correct my ignorance if I am mistaken.

You should see the agreement you need to agree to to get a .ca.

This one? It's 11009 words, and is the reason I didn't register a .CA domain. After reading about 10000 words you'll see that it's pointless, because they can change the terms whenever they feel like it. They should have just wrote "you agree we can do whatever we want after giving you 30 days notice", which is basically the same thing in 14 words.

There is stigma here in Canada against our TLD (.ca) for some reason. Americans hate it ("Pffft. Dot-c-a's suck!"), and Canadians seem to want the usual .com, .net, and .org TLDs.

That said, country-code TLDs usually cost more for some protectionist reason. You should see the agreement you need to agree to to get a .ca. All sorts of crazy shit which boils down to "Just be glad you don't need a trademark to get a .ca TLD anymore." They removed that insane requirement back when the cira took over.

but in past cases where domain had to be transferred, was it not because the domain name itself violate someone's IP rights, i.e. registering VinceCarter.com or WarrenSapp.com and trying to make the individual/company/entity/whatever pay exhorbitant fees for the domain. I know the federal government can and does do this (force domain transfers in certain cases), but since when did owning the rights to a product give a company the same rights as law enforcement... yeah yeah yeah, I know, RIAA.. blah blah blah.. also.. Im looking at this [cira.ca rules for registering .ca domain names] and fail to see how Directnic can legally take over the domain anyway.... I could see how they could have a case for having the site shut down, but not much more... but then again I A N A L

You can no longer be sure that something under .ca has any connection with Canada or that something under .ie has any connection with the Republic of Ireland (Eire). .CA domains can (basically) only be registered by Canadian citizens or residents, companies registered in Canada, or holders of Canadian trademarks.

Read CIRA's Canadian Presence Requirements.

In addition to the Versign scams, we have these idiots to deal with.

This of course has nothing to do with the ineptitude of these idiots.

The solution to dealing with these creeps naturally is to do business with a reputable, knowledgeable outfit, and the idiots seem to be kept at bay.

.mike

.. and by the way, CIRA (.ca) did it to elect its board members:
results

It took a couple of years to pass, but CIRA changed the rules for .ca domains last year, and even allowed existing .ca registrants one or two months to re-register to make sure they maintained their domains instead of having them "expire" and be snapped up by squatters.

All relevant info can be found here (English and French) http://www.cira.ca/

The previous example, where you had to be federally registered or have business operation presence in 2 or more provinces made sense in a way: domains were free of charge then.

I support the idea of only giving companies and registered organizations domains, and in that case, giving each only one. It encourages the use of subdomains, and it doesn't litter the namespace with useless domains, whose only purpose is because the domain was avaliable. (Free registration services like Name Zero make this even worse). If you really want a domain, register a company (as i was going to do to obtain a .ca) The cluttering of the .com/.net/.org namespace has almost rendered the DNS system a bit impotent.

Just my $0.02
-legolas

i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...

interestingly enough, these sound a lot like the types of restrictions that CIRA used to have for the .ca TLD. The rules have since been broadened to allow for more of a .com approach.

interestingly enough, these sound a lot like the types of restrictions that CIRA used to have for the .ca TLD. The rules have since been broadened to allow for more of a .com approach.

interestingly enough, these sound a lot like the types of restrictions that CIRA used to have for the .ca TLD. The rules have since been broadened to allow for more of a .com approach.

Funny, us Canadians have been doing it this way for a long time, with only one domain per person or organization:

• For .ca:
  • must be federally incorporated
  • must have offices in multiple provinces, or
  • have the domain based on a federally registered trademark
• For .sk.ca (Saskatchewan, Canada):
  • must be provincially incorporated
  • must have offices in multiple cities
• Everyone else can only get cityname.sk.ca - even city/town councils (see city.saskatoon.ca or town.outlook.sk.ca

This is no longer true, read Framework for the administration of the .CA domain name system for more information. The provincial names are optional now, and anyone is allowed to register. Domains are not free - anyone can become a registrar for $1000/year, and charge whatever they want for registration (expected to start at $40/year and decrease to about $15/year within 4 years). AFAIK, the policy for trademark disputes has not been decided yet.

From http://www.cira.ca/documents/cdncc.html :

4.3.2 Provincial, Territorial and Municipal Sub-Domains

Provincial, territorial or municipal sub-domains such as .BC.CA or .HALIFAX.NS.CA will be maintained for those registrants who wish to use them but will no longer be mandatory.