.CA history (1.Viewing)

Did you know:

in 1987, John Demco, Computing Facilities Manager at UBC, took the initiative to claim .CA for Canada, through his position at UBC.

Interestingly, Jan 12, 1988 the first name registered was UPEI.ca for U of PEI and not UBC.ca. That one was registered the next day.

After CIRA was formed to take over management, it _bought_ the rights to .CA for $4.348M from UBC - arguably an incredible bargain, but it wasn't just given to them.

Demco received a portion of the sale, possibly in the 25% range.

Demco presumably took that cash and parlayed it into a new business, co-founding Webnames.ca in the fall of 2000.

The only part I didn't know/remember was that CIRA paid UBC for the rights to .CA and that Demco got a healthy chunk of the sale. Pretty interesting to know.

It's too bad that CIRA didn't backdate registrations to their original registration date. Instead, everything seems to be dated 2000...

rlm 2742 said:

Demco presumably took that cash and parlayed it into a new business, co-founding Webnames.ca in the fall of 2000.

Click to expand...

I use Webnames exclusively when I am looking for a domain, I find their suggestions, name and extension layout one of the best.

Pricing is terrible and I have never bought from them but the web interface is great.

They are also sitting on a number of really good maple domains, they have a great portfolio.

Check out their interface: webnames.ca

John Demco is still a CIRA board advisor today. I always like talking to him when we meet, usually at the CIRA board meetings.

Lot of bull crap happened at the beginning. Many companies got killer domains for free like ok.ca, that they just resold later for huge money. Cira killed the value of .ca domains when they decided to keep it in Canada only. Jason and I had invested everything we had in.ca domain registrar and TBR to quickly realize that Cira just wanted a few of them like pool.com who ex staff were actually working at Cira as well. A whole bunch of crooks and I'll hate them forever. Actually if I can f*** em up in some kind of way, I definitely will.

Asselin said:

Lot of bull crap happened at the beginning. Many companies got killer domains for free like ok.ca, that they just resold later for huge money

Click to expand...

Wasn't this the same for .com (and I assume other legacy TLDs) until 1995? In the beginning, no one knew the value of a domain or even of the internet itself so why would they monetize it? And as a user, why would you want to pay?

I remember wanting to register .ca in 1999 or 2000, when it was only companies that could register a .ca. Then they opened it up shortly after to the public, with a landrush type system.