Toronto to get it's own domain extension (1.Viewing)

Right now, if you want an internet domain name that screams 'Toronto,' your best bet is to actually invest thousands of kilometres away in the far-off island kingdom of Tonga, which has .to as its internet country code top-level domain.


Read more:
https://www.blogto.com/tech/2022/04/toronto-internet-domain-names/

April Fools was four days ago...

UGH. I think you must have read my last post about CIRA and posted this just to rile me up.

The fact that CIRA is pitching .toronto, as a direct competitor to .ca, while their mandate is to protect and service .CA for all Canadians is so effed up to me.

Mr Holland, quit CIRA first to avoid any conflict of interest, then fucking start your own TLD consulting business and do it with your own money. The city of Toronto, if they proceed, can shop around for registry services and will probably choose CIRA anyways. I hope you make boatloads of money pitching new TLD's to cities around the world. But I see this as 100% conflict of interest for CIRA to be involved in pitching a direct competitor to .CA, _especially_ targeting Canadians.

What does everyone else think?

Might as well do every large city then...wtf

Funny enough, https://register.to/ has the CN tower in it's logo and the Toronto skyline as the background to it's website

Wonder how many people know or use the .TO for Toronto centric stuff?

if .toronto goes ahead, it will be fringe imo. sure it will get a bit of use but it will be limited.

Does no one have a concern that CIRA, the sole provider and protector .CA, is pitching .toronto and others? Does that not seem like an unbelievable conflict of interest? Taking .CA profits and spending them on direct competition to .CA?

I would agree, it should be an outside party contacting CIRA to do this, and funded by an outside party.

You are probably over thinking it.

All in all this will be a drop in the bucket and other than a tourist destination or hobby site who would actually use it?

I mean who would limit themselves to business inside of Toronto. Having run online stores for a long time I can tell you no successful online entrepreneur or business would ever consider it.

Look at .quebec as an example and that could be for the city and/or the province and the numbers are dismal.

That's probably true and maybe just the existence of a .toronto makes .ca look all the better.

But if CIRA is spending money on it that comes from their .ca revenue, is that right? How many side projects do .ca domain holders want to fund through their reg fees, if they cut out these project could .ca registrations be cheaper, or will they raise their fees to fund these kinds of things?

Spex said:

Funny enough, https://register.to/ has the CN tower in it's logo and the Toronto skyline as the background to it's website

Wonder how many people know or use the .TO for Toronto centric stuff?

Click to expand...

I won't lie, I thought .to stood for Toronto for the longest time...
I even know a few businesses located in Toronto that use .to instead of .ca

Domain names in the .to TLD / .to ccTLD are also commonly registered where 'to' may relate to a country or region other than Tonga, such as Toronto (Canada), Torino (Italy), Tokyo (Japan) or Tocantins (Brazil).

Click to expand...

MapleDots said:

You are probably over thinking it.

All in all this will be a drop in the bucket and other than a tourist destination or hobby site who would actually use it?

I mean who would limit themselves to business inside of Toronto. Having run online stores for a long time I can tell you no successful online entrepreneur or business would ever consider it.

Look at .quebec as an example and that could be for the city and/or the province and the numbers are dismal.

Click to expand...

While I agree with the fact it will be limited use, the crux of the problem for me is _only_ in the principle of the matter, that CIRA makes too much money that they have to dream up ways to spend it. I don't like the fact that they apparently have such excessive cash that they think they can use it to build new lines of business, competing with every day Canadian folks and businesses that _dont_ have the luxury of a monopoly to generate so much cash they literally have to find ways to spend it. CIRA is a non-profit meant to manage .CA on behalf of all Canadians. If they can't find useful projects that are directly increasing the value of .CA to spend all that excess cash on, then they should lower prices or spend more on promoting .CA. If CIRA execs and board members want to build an empire, they should quit CIRA and go do it with their own money. Building an empire is NOT CIRA's mandate.

And just to be clear, none of CIRA's forays are competing with me, so its not like I have an axe to grind. Its completely the principle of the matter.

This isn't any different than in BC where the gov't mandates use of gov't auto insurance. But then the politicians were taking profits from that to spend on their own pet projects completely unrelated to the reason you paid for auto insurance. It's just fucking wrong.