The Board of Directors of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is currently seeking interested individuals to serve as members on its 2010 Election Nomination Committee. Applications for consideration to become a member of the Nomination Committee will be accepted from January 4 to January 22, 2010.

CIRA is the steward of the .CA domain extension in Canada. Tucows has a long history of working with CIRA on its Board of Directors, and we encourage our Resellers in Canada to take an active role in CIRA, where possible.

You can visit this CIRA Nomination Committee webpage for more information about how to apply for a position on the Nomination Committee and the eligibility requirements. Feel free to pass this information around to other people that you feel might be interested or qualified to serve in this fashion.

The new WHOIS Policy is now in effect at the Canadian Internet Registry Authority (CIRA). That means the contact information for individual registrants of .ca domain names is now hidden by default. Registrant information for non-individuals is exposed by default.

For example, as of today, a WHOIS lookup on a personal .ca domain reveals only the Registrar and name servers, in addition to the creation and renewal dates. Yesterday, full information, including home address, phone number and email address was returned.

Back when the policy was announced, the general consensus was that CIRA had thrust itself to a leadership position in the area of WHOIS privacy. The Policy was lauded for the balance it struck between the rights of the Registrant and the rights of the public to access Registrant information.

However, it seems that some aspects of the new Policy, including backdoors for law enforcement and intellectual property owners, have resulted in some of those laurels being swapped out for darts.

As you would expect, Tucows’ OpenSRS domain name system is fully compliant with the new policy.

As we pointed out last week, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) which operates the .ca registry, is about to introduce some big changes to its existing WHOIS policies. The changes are largely associated with what information WHOIS databases, registrars and resellers are able to disclose about registrants.

These upcoming changes will have a pretty significant impact on some of our .CA policies. Specifically:
Our public WHOIS database, like CIRA’s, will protect registrant information by default. All personal information about individual registrants will be kept private, including the name of the Registrant and the name and any contact information.

• Registrants have the ability to disable WHOIS privacy from the CIRA registrant interface if they choose to do so. It is enabled by default.
• Corporations and organizations will have the option to request similar WHOIS protection in special circumstances. It is disabled by default.
• Interested third parties will still be able to contact the registrant by using a contact form available on CIRA’s website (similar to other WHOIS privacy services).
• Resellers will be required to keep registrant information confidential, revealing personal information via telephone or otherwise under very specific circumstances only.

These changes will come into effect on June 10. CIRA will begin messaging registrants about the upcoming changes this week.

After much deliberation and consultation (in other words, in true Canadian fashion), the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has announced that WHOIS Privacy will go into effect on .ca domain names beginning June 10th, 2008.

The CIRA approach to WHOIS privacy is quite interesting and demonstrates a clear desire to protect the privacy of Registrants. There is full information on the new policies at the CIRA website.

In his Law Bytes column in today’s Toronto Star, Michael Geist calls the new policy “a model for domain name registries around the world.”

Geist goes on to suggest that CIRA is now in a global leadership position on the issue of registrant privacy. Geist writes, “With more than a million Canadian domain name registrations, the resolution of the whois issue ensures that the Canadian domain name space is set for continued growth as it now features a “privacy advantage” over other domains struggling to strike a similar compromise.”

What makes the CIRA policy different is that WHOIS privacy is enabled by default for individual domain owners. Registrants have to specifically opt-out with CIRA to have their information displayed. In contrast, the registration information for corporate domain holders is shown by default, however, they can opt-out and hide the information in what CIRA calls special circumstances.

As you would expect, we’ll be fully complying with the new policies. We’ll have more on how things will work from both a Registrar and from the Reseller perspective soon.

Mark Jeftovic of EasyDNS makes some great points about the CIRA Board of Directors election currently underway. CIRA is the organization responsible for running the registry and managing the policy for the dotCA ccTLD.

During my 3-year tenure on the CIRA Board, I got the opportunity to travel across the country. Whenever we held a public forum anywhere in Canada, the turnout was usually quite high and the participants informed and enthusiastic.

Then near the end of every open forum I made it a habit to ask the attendees the following question: “How many people here voted in the last election?” and the silence was usually deafening. Less than 10 hands would go up every time, guaranteed.

So why the disconnect between getting live bodies out to an actual event and getting stakeholders to click a few buttons through their web browser?

– via Mark Jeftovic

Historically, a very small number of people were responsible for casting the votes for the candidates that get elected to the CIRA Board – less than 1000 votes were necessary to get elected in past elections. This really needs to change – the bar should be much higher, which means more members need to get involved.

I'm actually a candidate in this election and if you are a CIRA member, I'd really appreciate it if a) you would get involved in this election, and b) support my candidacy by casting a vote in my favor.

I’m going to resist the temptation to turn this blog post into a shameless self-promotion, so if you are interested in my “platform”, you can read more here, here and here. If you have any questions about how to cast a vote or about specific issues raised by my platform, please be sure to drop me a line!