From One Extreme to the Other
When I first started registering domain names, back in 1996, the .CA domain was very restricted. Domains registered in Canada could basically only be done by Canadian businesses or organizations. And if you weren’t federally registered (or registered in more than one province) you had to settle for a province based domain, such as mydomain.ab.ca instead of mydomain.ca. And if your company name or a trademark you owned wasn’t “mydomain” you couldn’t register mydomain.ca. It wasn’t ideal but it’s far better than what we have now. And it didn’t cost anything to register a domain back then either (as far as I remember).
Then along came the idea that the domain should be opened up and CIRA was created. Suddenly, with all this overhead and a bunch of registrars wanting to make money, .CA domains cost money. Oh, and so long as you were a Canadian citizen, you could now register whatever you want. And this has turned our coveted .CA domain into a big <insert explicit words here> money grab.
Today I was thinking that it would be cool to a have a Canadian-focused site about flying. Unfortunately, flying.ca is taken. But the site is simply a facade to an American company called Domain Sponsor, based in Los Angeles, with a bunch of useless links and pop-up ads. What’s the point? A perfectly good domain wasted, all for $50 (most of which goes to the registrar anyway).
So we’ve gone from one extreme to the other. I would have much preferred some sort of happy medium in the middle, where some clown with a lot of money couldn’t simply gobble up a bunch of good domains in order to hopefully make money from click-throughs or whatever.
Thu, 24 Mar 2005 18:23 Posted in Technology
