The .ca domain extension is celebrating its 10 year anniversary, but with a decade under it’s belt, how is this top level domain performing?

Michael Geist wrote an article in the Toronto Star citing how the current mandate of CIRA seems to be different than the objective it originally and officially set out to achieve.

While the direction CIRA decides to go in is somewhat up in the air, I am left wondering how the average Internet user and domain purchased feels about the .ca extension.

The sales agents for our web hosting division tell me that just about all customers we have in Canada still choose to have a .com address as opposed to a .ca.

This is largely because the Internet population overall, seems more comfortable typing .com at the end of a web address, than they do anything else.

Even with the plethora of top level domain names to choose from, .com is still the overwhelming favorite by a landslide.

In the ideal scenario, our customers choose to register both the .com and .ca version of their domain name just to make sure they are covering all their bases. After all, if you can make sure that your website is everywhere a visitor may go looking, then you can probably sleep easy knowing you’ve got everything covered.

Other customers are forced to go with the .ca domain name because the .com is taken.

That begs the question of whether Canadians only view .ca as a backup if the .com is taken? That probably isn’t what CIRA wants to hear!

And, if the .ca is simply a backup choice, can CIRA do anything to change that in the next 10 years?