I recently attended the annual meeting of CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the agency that runs the dot-ca "domain." There's an unwritten history in the growth of this internet thing. CIRA (http://www.cira.ca/), soon to register the millionth dot.ca domain name, gives a glimpse of the complexity of the infrastructure required to administer what the internet has become.
CIRA began as the part-time responsibility of a prof or two at UBC. Now it's an institution that raises and spends about $8 million a year, and it's building out like crazy. Why? Well, seek out a dot.ca site and you go through CIRA's servers -- it happens about 4 million times a day. It will be four billion times a day in a decade.
One little bit of geopolitical history, reflected in the system of national domains: You will encounter Australian sites (.au), British sites (.uk), German sites (.de), Russian sites (.ru), and so on, sites from all around the world. But never a dot.us. The suffix exists, but it's never used. Somehow national domains are for the rest of the world. The United States, a world unto itself on the World Wide Web, gets by with dot-com (40 million dot-com sites in the world, all managed by an American registry), dot-edu, dot-org, and so on.
