Canada's Internet goes bilingual
2013 has started with good news for Canadian Internet users, businesses and trademark/domain name owners who do business here.
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) announced in early January that the .ca registry now supports the use of the full range of French characters in .ca domain names. Until now, .ca domain names were restricted to the letters a to z, the numbers 0 to 9 and hyphens, leaving Francophone Internet users with no choice but to register French words without the benefit of the accented letters or ligatures é, ë, ê, è, â, à, æ, ô, oe, ù, û, ü, ç, î, ï, and ÿ.
The advantages of being able to register domain names that correspond exactly to trademarks and business names in both of Canada’s official languages are clear, but the technical and policy challenges caused by the use of accented letters are not as readily apparent.
One of the primary issues is the existence of multiple variations of the same word depending on where, or which, accents appear—a single word may have dozens of different spelling variations. To overcome this problem, CIRA has implemented an ‘Administrative Bundling’ policy whereby domain names which share the same base but contain different accented characters are considered variants of each other and form an administrative bundle.
Once a domain name or a variant of the domain name is registered by a registrant, all possible variations in the bundle are reserved for that particular registrant and cannot be registered by anyone else—this includes all currently registered domain names. While the registrant is not under an obligation to register all variants in the bundle, any variant s/he wishes to use must be registered individually and by the same registrar.
This development is significant given the meteoric rise in popularity of Canada’s national domain name space in the last few years. CIRA has become the fourth fastest-growing domain name registry and the 14th largest country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry in the world.
“ONCE A DOMAIN NAME OR A VARIANT OF THE DOMAIN NAME IS REGISTERED BY A REGISTRANT, ALL POSSIBLE VARIATIONS IN THE BUNDLE ARE RESERVED FOR THAT PARTICULAR REGISTRANT.”
While it still lags significantly behind such ccTLD powerhouses as Germany, the UK, the EU and China in terms of total domains registered, .ca has come a long way from the almost afterthought status it had even a decade ago. Back then, .com and other generic top-level domains (gTLDs) were still the TLDs of choice for Canadian businesses that aspired to reach beyond Canada’s borders into the global marketplace.
It took almost 21 years to reach the millionth .ca registration in 2008 but only four years to double that number at the end of 2012. Today, according to statistics compiled and released in mid-January 2013 by CIRA, Canadians rank first in the world for time spent on the Internet per month, and 49 percent of Canadians prefer .ca for business use.
Opening up the registry to bilingual domains will undoubtedly fuel an even greater acceleration in its rate of growth and CIRA, which predicts that .ca registrations will double again in possibly less than four years, continues to ensure the registry’s architecture has the necessary stability and security to handle such rapid growth.
Unlike other imminent changes in the domain name system, such as the launch of new gTLDs, the impact on trademark owners of the introduction of French-language domain registrations in .ca is not so uncertain or negative.
The overall .ca landscape has not changed and the .ca registry has a domain dispute resolution policy in place (the CDRP), which underwent an overhaul in August 2011 and is, arguably, now a better tool for brand owners seeking to protect their trademarks in the .ca name space.
Nevertheless, with increased opportunity comes increased potential for infringement and misuse and Canadian trademark owners are encouraged, as always, to include .ca domain names in both English and French as part of their trademark/domain name strategy in this country.
