CIRA announced it has reached the two million mark for registered .CA Internet domain names. This milestone demonstrates Canadians’ rapidly increasing adoption of .CA domain names for personal and business use: it took 21 years for one million .CA domain names to be registered and just four years to reach the next million.
The two million mark is all the more poignant as it comes at the close of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the .CA domain. It was established in 1987 by a group of volunteers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and transferred to CIRA in 2000. In 1988, the first .CA domain name, upei.ca, was registered by the University of Prince Edward Island.
eora Rissin, a retired schoolteacher from Toronto, Ontario, registered the two-millionth .CA domain name, algonquinhouse.ca. She is planning to use it to promote her new small business, a bed and breakfast near High Park.
“For me, having a .CA lets everyone know you’re a Canadian business,” said Ms. Rissin.
“.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.”
.CA is the fourth fastest-growing Internet domain name registry and the fourteenth largest compared to other country specific domain names like .uk (United Kingdom). “When we started the .CA domain there were only a few thousand computers on the Internet – in total – and no one thought it would ever be so pervasive,” says John Demco, who led the team responsible for creating the .CA top-level domain at UBC in 1987. “Now Canada leads the world in the amount of time its citizens spend online, and while the Internet from a technology perspective doesn’t concern itself with nationality, Canadians strongly identify with.CA domain names and the registration of two million .CAs is proof of that.”
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