Did you know CIRA is unique in Canada? Before the internet was a force to be reckoned with, a small group of volunteers realized that domain names would be key to navigating the web. This crew figured out that Canada needed its own address. And so, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority—aka CIRA—was born.
CIRA was built by visionaries, for us all.
Before the internet was a force to be reckoned with, a small group of volunteers realized that domain names would be key to navigating the web. They saw that Canada needed its own address. A group of volunteers, led by John Demco, a former Computing Facilities Manager for the Department of Computer Science at
the University of British Columbia (UBC) set out to make it a whole lot easier to register a .CA domain in Canada. After building a platform from scratch, they gathered a group of stakeholders, bringing together government and industry, to create a big and bold new registry that has grown ever since. And so, CIRA was born.
1980
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1987
UBC volunteers start managing .CA registry
1990
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1998
CIRA becomes incorporated to manage the .CA registry
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1999
Assistant Deputy Minister of Industry, Michael Binder, writes a comfort letter recognizing CIRA as the operator of .CA
2000
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2000
CIRA begins managing .CA registry
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2008
It’s time to celebrate! We reach 1 million .CA registrations
2010
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2010
CIRA launches a new registry system
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2011
We launch the Canadian Internet Forum (CIF)
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2012
.CA celebrates its 25-year anniversary and launches French character domain names
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2014
CIRA founds the Community Investment Program (CIP)
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2015
The Internet Performance Test (IPT), Registry Lock and CIRA Anycast DNS all launch
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2017
We bring .kiwi onboard as the first CIRA Registry Platform customer
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2018
We launch the CIRA DNS Firewall
2020
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2020
CIRA celebrates 3 million .CA registrations
Future
Our vision
We help build Canada’s corner of the internet as the registry of .CA domains. But we also do much more than that. By nurturing the development of .CA as a go-to public resource, we push to protect its integrity for .CA domain holders and build a better internet across Canada and around the world.
We like to imagine a connected future where the internet empowers people to reach their economic, social and cultural goals. Our job is to ensure it’s a trusted internet for all Canadians.