The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is a non-profit Canadian
corporation that is responsible for operating the .ca Internet country code
Top Level Domain (ccTLD) today.
Previously, only federally incorporated companies could have a .ca
domain, while provincially incorporated companies required the letters of their
province, like .mb.ca . Only an entity with presence in two or more
provinces was typically registered directly under .ca.
Currently, any of the above listed parties can register a domain with a name of their choosing followed directly by .ca , with the following second-level domains existing primarily as a historical artifact from the time before CIRA managed the .ca domain:
- .ab.ca - Alberta
- .bc.ca - British Columbia
- .mb.ca - Manitoba
- .nb.ca - New Brunswick
- .nf.ca - Newfoundland (replaced by .nl.ca)
- .nl.ca - Newfoundland and Labrador
- .ns.ca - Nova Scotia
- .nt.ca - Northwest Territories
- .nu.ca - Nunavut
- .on.ca - Ontario
- .pe.ca - Prince Edward Island
- .qc.ca - Quebec
- .sk.ca - Saskatchewan
- .yk.ca - Yukon
In preparation for the implementation of Internationalized Domain Names(IDN),
domain names that begin with the four characters xn-- are not available for
registration.
Canadian Domain Names which match the name of an existing top-level domain,
such as com.ca or ca.ca, are reserved and therefore not available for new registrations.
Certain expletives are not accepted as names and the municipal names of individual
cities and localities within Canada are also reserved nationwide.
Names which exist at any of the levels (.ca or an individual province or territory)
are restricted in their availability elsewhere in the .ca hierarchy. Registration,
if it can be done at all, requires manual intervention by the prospective registrar
and the permission of all existing registrant(s) must be obtained by CIRA.
Expiration - After a thirty-day redemption period, intended to provide the
original registrant one final chance to reclaim a suspended name, the expired
names are assigned a to-be-released (TBR) status. These names are made available
through a weekly auction process, in which lists of available names are posted
online and advance bids are placed by prospective registrants through the various
.ca registrars.
Domains which receive no bids are then released and made openly available for new registrations.
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