OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Starting January 13 Go Daddy started supporting .ca Internationalized Domain Names with French characters. This means French-Canadian individuals and businesses can now register the English and French versions of their domain name.
The .ca registration and management process is very specific, so to simplify the information, Go Daddy has broken it down into several categories listed below. Check it out:
One Registrant: The registrant of a particular .ca domain name will have the exclusive right to register all of the variants of that domain name. We call this process “bundling.” For example, only the registrant of grace.ca can register grâce.ca, and vise-versa.
Single Account: If a registrant wants to move their domains into another account with us and initiates an account change, they will be prompted to move all of their .ca variants. If they don’t accept the request to move all variants, the account change cannot be submitted.
Same Registrar and Contact Information: .ca domain names and their IDN variants must be registered in the same account, with the same registrar, and must have the same registrant contact information.
Bundle Transfers: If a registrant wants to transfer their .ca domain name, they must submit a transfer request for all other variants of that name. If they don’t submit a request for the variants within 5 days, the transfer will fail for all .ca domains.
Identical Prices: We’re keeping costs simple. All .ca domain names, IDN or not, will have the same registration and renewal fees.
Interesting, I tried to look up one on Go Daddy yesterday and the site told me that I had entered illegal characters: “Only letters, numbers or hyphens are allowed” … I’m still getting this error now. Were you able to register an IDN .ca at Go Daddy?
Hi Frank,
sorry but I haven’t tried it as I don’t own any .ca domains. 🙂
I see. Did they announce this anywhere? So far I’ve only see the announcement from the registry (CIRA) itself.
Go Daddy announced it. I think it was in their support pages.
I found it: http://ca.godaddy.com/domains/searchidn.aspx
Quebec is to small of an area to focus on this niche when there are bigger fish to fry, you can still pick up 2l .ca drops, nothing new to be had here…
@Eman: If you follow that argument, why focus on Canada at all, when the US market is much larger.
22.3% of the Canadian population speaks French and those don’t all live in Quebec. Even they need domains 😉