The domain name registry that operates it is the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA).

Examples of valid entities include: The domain name was originally allocated by Jon Postel, operator of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), to John Demco of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1987.

[5] In 1997, at the Canadian annual Internet conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Canadian Internet community, with a view to liberalize registration procedures and substantially improve turnaround times, decided to undertake reform of the .ca Registry.

[citation needed] Currently, any of the above listed parties can register a domain with a name of their choosing followed directly by .ca.

Internationalized domain names (IDN) were introduced in January 2013 with a limited selection of characters (é, ë, ê, è, â, à, æ, ô, œ, ù, û, ü, ç, î, ï, ÿ) to allow French language text with diacritics.

Length must be 2-63 characters, including the xn-- prefix encoding for internationalised domain names.

Exceptions were typically names registered before the restriction was introduced, such as the Canadian Governor General at gg.ca.

[10] For instance, if the province of New Brunswick were to want to register "gouv.nb.ca",[11] CIRA's normal automated WHOIS and registration tools would simply return the following error: The domain name provided conflicts with at least one other registered domain name (e.g. xyz.ca conflicts with xyz.on.ca).