CIRA Explores Allowing French Accents in .CA Domain Names

Currently, you won’t find a single Canadian domain with an “é” or a “ç." 

However, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) are working to change this, by allowing the use of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in Canadian domain registries.  CIRA are now entering into the second and final round of consultations before allowing the use of IDNs in Canada.

If you own a French-based business and want to register a domain name, you are actually quite limited in your choices.  In fact, the only available characters are English ones (a-z, 0-9, and ‘-’).  Since Canada is officially billingual, with ~7 million peoplespeaking French, proponents of change view the current situation as unfair.

The first round of consultations last fall drew an incredible number of comments, which were compiled and summarized at idnconsultation.ca.  Byron Holland, President and CEO of CIRA, believes IDNs are necessary to accurately reflect the diversity of our country. “Internationalized Domain Names are critical to enable Canadians to register and access domain names in both of Canada's official languages.  The level of response we received during the first phase of the consultation demonstrates how important this issue is to our Registrants.”

The second round is now underway, and an interactive copy of the revised policy can be found on their website.  The public are invited to comment and make submissions by visiting the IDN consultation page until February 24th, 2012.  Currently, IDNs are available many other gTLD (such as .com and .org) and ccTLD registries (such as .eu and .de).