In order to make it to the final ballot, I still need to collect at least 20 votes of support! Please vote for me at the CIRA

Canadian Internet Registration Authority

election site! https://elections.cira.ca/2010/en/election.html

If you are a .ca domain-owner (or care enough about Internet policy, such as CIRA representation of public interests in meetings with the CRTC  and infrastructure in Canada, such as the implementation of DNSSEC, BIND10, and IPv6)

• The branding of dot-ca domains consistent throughout the CIRA site is clear:

1. the .ca brand is associated with organizations Canadians trust;
2. eligibility for .ca top-level domains is contingent on a legitimate Canadian connection, as defined by Canadian presence requirements;
3. .ca domains convey comfort and confidence to form business relationships; many top-level domains can be registered by anyone, anywhere; interacting with a business emphasizing its .ca domain encourages business relationships; clarity that Canadian law applies to transactions promotes confidence to form relationships that view clear legal framework as a source of strength rather than restrictions to avoid.

I share Rick’s straightforward values that emphasize the integrity that a .ca top-level should be reflective of a true Canadian presence.

Porter's Five Forces model allows a structured, systematic evaluation of the differential strategic relationship between a firm and its competitive environment

CIRA asserts the .ca top-level domain as a “key public resource” consistently; however, technology remains a cat-and-mouse game where the reality is even if you’re smarter than one in a million people, the world is a big place, and assuming latest estimates of just under 2 billion global Internet users, out-thinking at least 2,000 people who are smarter than you most of the time–or nearly 70 people smarter than anyone in Canada all of the time–actually means risk from technological threats is easily-quantified and membership can reliably allocate resources appropriate to the the type and value of assets at risk.

Just as uncertain as we are about the precise nature of the next successful technological threat, we are equally certain about what amount of loss we were not only prepared to accept, but in fact built into the resource allocation decision.

What does have influence on businesses that associate with the .ca domain brand and CIRA not only has complete control over but the 2009 Annual Report recognizes that since CIRA’s sole source of operating revenues are domain registrations by its 154 registrars over which CIRA has no formal control and no clear strategic relationships.

This represents both a significant exposure due to complete dependence on registrars as a source of operating revenues, with which CIRA has no formal control or apparent strategic alignment; the corollary is that there remains complete freedom to define all aspects of future strategic relationships. Although CIRA promulgates a single consistent and coherent .ca positioning and claims moderate 60% preference to conduct business with .ca-branded domains; however, it is not clear whether this slight advantage is directly attributable to reputation earned by the large, stable, conservative organizations such as Canada Post, the many federal government departments operating under the .ca ccTLD and the even more numerous provincial government departments operating under the provincial second-level domains.

The 2008-2009 Annual Report announced an aggressive education programme designed to support registrars in their sales function and identified small-to-medium-sized enterprises as a target segment.

The same infrastructure that translates to low incremental cost to service each additional .ca domain that each registration fee brings also means that CIRA’s commitment to “Five nines” DNS availability necessarily commits a significant incremental fixed cost for initiatives such as the migration to BIND10 regardless of whether CIRA DNS servers will remain authoritative for a given .ca domain.

Each time a user clicks a link in their browser in order to navigate to a web page (or attempts to initiate an FTP, SSH, telnet, IRC, MSN, or any other connection on the Internet), they initiate a series of close to 10 processes, all of which must complete successfully in order to fulfill the user’s request. Successful completion of each click, however, appears to the user as one action (click) and one result (new page displayed, if successful; status code, such as “404 Not Found” displayed otherwise).

Domain Name Server resolution of a .ca domain to a numeric IPv4 address is one of these steps. Although CIRA members, staff, and management are surely well-aware, as well as technically-inclined and -informed users know that resolution of a .ca domain for which CIRA DNS servers are authoritative, the majority of Internet users would view failures at any point in the sequence as failure of a single process. Although “five nines” high availability, security, and trustworthiness of the .ca domain brand may be intuitively-linked in our minds, current aggressive publicity about the number of DNS requests per minute and sophisticated steps to localized and mitigate security exposures to processes over which CIRA does exert direct control implies users can trust the entire sequence of events they initiate with each click. Although Statistics Canada (2005) highlighted the three-quarters of Canadians concerned about Internet security, this even more underscores the need to manage expectations of secure transactions.

Educating Canadians on the technical intricacies of why CIRA was not responsible for identity theft that occurred because the .ca domain’s hosting provider neglected to update a critical security component is neither a realistic solution nor does it explain why the much-touted DNSSEC, IPv6, BIND10, and other initiatives the Annual Report said would keep Canadians safe did nothing to prevent precisely what they feared. Cursory investigation of a convenience sample of registrars shows a disconnect between CIRA positioning of the .ca brand as a differentiated product with distinct advantages and inconsistent responses to what the real differences between .ca and other domains are. Perhaps the most undermining to CIRA’s branding–and even the importance of CIRA DNS services in the first place–are answers such as the following from

http://baremetal.com/domains/ca_faq.html#ca_diff

What is different about .ca domains?

Quite a few things, which most of which are due to CIRA. The biggest difference is that _everyone_ registering a .ca domain name has to visit the CIRA website to accept their (very long) registrant agreement. Many changes to domain registrations also require a visit to the CIRA website for confirmation. Basically anything which affects ownership of a domain has to be confirmed at the CIRA website. While it can be a nuisance, there are a number of positive benefits (for example registrar transfers are fast and simple when compared to the com/net/org world).

The most benficial educational programme should logically focus on nurturing strategic relationships with registrars before introducing the complexity of targeting small businesses. The small business segment, though it would doubtless appreciate the trust and brand equity builtith different business practices, ethical guidelines, and priorities.

Further segmentation studies and investigation of a new small-business segment with distinct positioning catering to the needs and CIRA should encourage strategic alignment and partnership with the registrars, highlighting the value of a more consistent vision for the .ca domain brand. Perhaps more importantly, though, it could serve to insulate the hard-earned trust in the current .ca brand likely established by major institutional organizations against the certain uncertainty and diversity of business practices that necessarily would result from specifically targeting and increasing the proportion of small and medium businesses comprising the dot-ca domainspace. Another registrar from the same convenience sample further undermines CIRA’s branding efforts in a way neither aligned with the Baremetal position, above, nor with CIRA’s .ca brand efforts.

The Fidonet Mascot: Click for historical BBS Listings Google Results

Canreg.Com directly dismisses any accountability or perceived trust in the .ca brand as a “myth.” In order to make my own positioning clear, aware that I might have taken some of you by surprise, I believe I can make a unique contribution to evolution off the Internet in Canada. Other specialized candidates may have more training or experience than I in their respective specializations. But just as classical experimental research aims to isolate individual variables to study them without interference from confounding effects whereas factorial research designs and multivariate analysis acknowledges that some effects are evident only as the result of interactions between variables, I believe I bring to the table a cohesive vision of the Internet, uniquely informed by my understanding of it as the complex evolving union of sociological, technological, and commercial aspects of society. I contrast this with a popular model of the Internet as the application of technology to facilitate societal interaction driven by commercial investment that I feel has the same pigeon-holing effect that old-school marketing segmentation based ondemographics or psychographics had, trying to assign individuals to contrived categories rather than the current statistical methods that identify groups of customers that share buying behaviours and preferences but that may transcend attempts to label with a characteristic consistent across the segment.

RIM Inter@ctive 950 Two-way pager that I had before the Blackberry

In the same way that I saw the natural co-evolution of society with technology in the BBS world and immediately adopted wireless voice in 1991, wireless data in 1994, and RIM’s pre-blackberry two-way pager in 1998 not so much because I believed those technologies would become the dominant design but because their later widespread incorporation into society was contingent upon some user base supporting vision so they would survive and develop to what society eventually embraced. This passion for and belief in the Internet as part of society and not parallel with it, I believe, can inform policy and infrastructure that anticipates future challenges and roles rather than reacts to it.

Added September 10, 2010: The Show of Support has passed.  According to the site, I received 12 out of the 20 that I require; however, since they are not able to make the official announcement until September 13, it is possible that there are votes not counted in the online tally.  I’ll keep you all posted, but for now, I thought I’d share the response of the President, Byron Holland, to my strategic assessment: