[thelist] Canadian Domains .. Even More Info.

[Seb Barre]

At 12:44 PM 11/2/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>
>Further to my earlier message, I understand that domainsatcost.ca are not
>accepting ANY new registrations for .ca domains until November 7th/8th, when
>some of the bugs in the transition will hopefully be straightened out.
>
>I've also heard that some people have paid for NEW domains, and have now
>been told that they aren't available, or that there is no guarantee that
>they will BE available, and NO, they can't get a refund.  OUCH.
>
>I'd hold off registering any Canadian domains for at least a week, if not
>longer.

This is true.  But it's not really because of bugs.  I've been following 
the whole CA-Net transfer of authority for a few years now (and it is in 
fact several years overdue, with the original transfer scheduled for late 
1998 or early 1999 if I recall).  Control of the CA-Net is being moved from 
the University of British Columbia to CIRA, a newly formed agency 
specifically for this purpose.

The transfer is further hindered by the fact that all the registration 
rules and policies are changing at the same time (a bad idea in my 
mind).  Add to that the fact that over 1,000 3rd party companies have 
either been certified or applied for certification to resell .CA domains, 
and then on top of that (can you see the problem yet? heh), that they are 
removing the provincial designations on all domains, and you get a serious 
logistical mess.

CIRA is going to start processing pre-orders and the queue of existing 
orders on November 8th, but if you're in that queue or planning on getting 
a .ca domain, don't expect it on that day.  My contacts at my old job (an 
ISP) have told me that it will most likely take several weeks to process 
all the applications that are currently waiting.

This is important if you're planning any kind of marketing or advertising 
tie-in with a new domain name, so be sure to get a realistic date from your 
registrar as to when you domain will be registered and "live" on the net.

More information on this (for those interested) can be found at: 
http://www.cira.ca/

To finish this off though, I dealt with the original CA-Net registry for 
several years, registering domains and making changes to existing ones, and 
while this whole transfer mess might be inconvenient to some at the moment, 
it's going to be a very good thing in the long term, as the old system was 
very hard to work with and was not in any way able to scale to the growing 
demand for domain names.   And this wasn't the registrars' fault, they were 
doing the best they could, but the infrastructure just wasn't there (alot 
of stuff was being done manually through human-to-human emails etc)..


--- -- -
Seb Barre - sebastien at oven.com
OVEN Digital Toronto
Work: 416-595-9750 x 222
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