[thelist] Canadian Domains .. Even More Info.
Seb Barre
sebastien at oven.com
Thu Nov 2 12:02:30 CST 2000
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
Mobile: 416-254-5078
http://www.oven.com/
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