At 2:59 PM -0500 2/15/03, elliot noss wrote: >You are right wrt .es or .fr, but you are not with respect to .uk and >.de. .ca is interesting because Canadians overwhelmingly used .com >until registration was liberalized and since then it has shifted >significantly (it was 90% .com and 10% .ca and is now probably >somewhere at 30-50% .ca (Paul, CIRA should do a study)).
The main problem is that it's not COMPLETELY liberalised. We have a global Internet, yet in the "affiliate selling" arena, there are many merchants that will only allow "U.S. webmasters" because their target market is "U.S. web surfers". No matter how many times you tell them that the most successful website targetted at "U.S. web surfers" could well be hosted in the USA, but designed and run by a "Argentinian webmaster", they just don't get it. CIRA is the same. They're limiting the uptake of .ca - and therefore ecommerce in Canada as well. For example, there are probably THOUSANDS of non-Canadian "webmasters" who are affiliates of eBay Canada, who would dearly love to build a website at a .ca location to target Canadian users, but they can't because of CIRA's rule. The only way around it appear to be the incorporation of a company in Canada, but for MOST affiliates, spending hundreds of dollars a year in business expenses just to be allowed to register a $20 domain name, that's prohibitive, and certainly not efficient. -- Paul Gordon, IQ Management Corporation http://iqmc.com
