All About French Character .CA Domain Names: Coming January 2013

November, 2012

The Canadian Internet Registry Authority

Background

• Canada has two official languages – French and English – but until now, Canadians could only register .CA domain names correctly in English; French characters, (e.g., é, â, œ) were not supported.

• In November 2010, the CIRA board of directors tasked the corporation with supporting French characters in .CA domain names.

• CIRA consulted with Canadians to devise the best strategy for implementing French characters

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Background

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• Starting January 13, 2013, CIRA will begin supporting all French characters in .CA domain names, allowing Canadians to register their domain names correctly in French or English.

• French characters are part of what are known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), characters outside the ASCII* a-z alphabet, numbers (0-9) and hyphens (-).

French .CA Characters: é, ë, ê, è â, à, æ ô, œ ù, û, ü ç î, ï ÿ

*American Standard Code for Information Interchange

Administrative Bundles • CIRA will bundle together all character variants of a given .CA

domain name. • Domain names with French characters which share the same base

(referred to as a “common canonical form”) will be considered variants of each other and form what is called an “administrative bundle”. For example, çira.ca and cirà.ca are variants of a common canonical form (cira.ca) and are part of an administrative bundle.

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Domain Name Lifecycle

• Every French character version of a .CA domain name will automatically become part of an administrative bundle.

• Each domain name in a bundle will retain its own life cycle.

• Each variant in a bundle must be registered individually, and each registered variant has its own life cycle.

Registration Create .CA

domain name

Registered (1-10 years)

Auto-renew grace period

(45 days)

Redemption grace period

(30 days)

To be released

(up to one week)

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Domain Registration

• When an existing domain is registered, all other domains in the bundle are withheld, meaning they can only be registered by the existing Registrant.

• A Registrant may register a French character .CA domain without registering the ASCII (non-accented) domain.

Example: • Only the holder of preside.ca will have the option to

register préside.ca if they wish. • A Registrant can register préside.ca without registering

preside.ca.

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• When transferring a domain name to a new Registrar or Registrant, all variants of the domain name in the bundle must be transferred at the same time.

• No variant of the bundle can be registered by another party unless the entire bundle is transferred to them or all variants in the bundle expire.

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French Character .CA Name Implementation

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do all Registrars support French characters?

A: CIRA provides several different services through its Registrars, and not all Registrars support every CIRA product offerings. Please verify your selected Registrar supports the CIRA service you require.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do all browsers support French characters? A: Each browser has their own method for supporting and displaying

non-ASCII characters. Generally, non-ASCII characters are supported in the following

browsers:

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Firefox 2.0 IE 7.0 Safari 1.2 Mozilla 1.4

Chrome 1.0 Netscape 7.1 Opera 7.11

Frequently Asked Questions

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Q: Are there any security concerns? A: Research shows IDNs do not increase

security risks for Internet users, particularly for phishing.

For more information, see the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) report, which details why IDNs do not materially increase risks related to phishing. Moreover, CIRA’s use of bundling domains significantly reduces the ability to use .CA IDNs for phishing.

Q: Can accented French characters be used for .CA email addresses?

A: Supporting French characters for email addresses is not within CIRA’s ability to control; it is a function of email client and server software. Support for non-ASCII characters for email is far from uniform so functionality will vary.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Questions, Comments, Concerns?

• We're here to help! – Visit the French character .CA page

of our website – Read our French character .CA

FAQs – Contact customer support:

Tel: 1-877-860-1411 Monday to Friday, 8:00 to 20:00 (Eastern)

– Online form – Live chat

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