Thanks. Those are great questions.
I'm glad you raised the issue of CIRA and the “dot.ca” domain name. I spent six years on that board. I think it's a well-run, terrific organization. There are more than one million dot.ca domain names registered.
I think we ought to recognize that it generates sizeable sums of money. The way it works is that you register a domain name and you pay that, effectively, licence renewal year after year. The costs of the registry are relatively low, so you're generating quite a surplus of funds.
I think we ought to be doing something good with that surplus of funds. The government still does play a role. It sits on the board in an ex officio capacity on CIRA. The proposal I put forward was indeed to provide everybody with one free domain name. I think, actually, you could do that both as a mechanism to encourage people online... I think it would actually spur business investment, because then you get people who have the domain name and want to start doing things with it. So that's good in that sense.
From CIRA's perspective, I don't think it eats away at all of their revenue, because there are still going to be businesses who want to register, and individuals who want more than one domain name, for which they're going to have to pay. I think it's a nice, tangible way for Canada to create more of a presence online in the form of the dot.ca.
So that's the dot.ca proposal. In terms of what government can be doing, let me touch back for a minute on one of the issues that didn't necessarily seem immediately relevant to new media. This was the issue of open government.
One of the things government ought to be doing to prepare Canadians, so to speak, for this new world is to prepare itself. The reality today is that we talk about all these exciting, innovative things taking place within the private sector. There is mounting expectation for the government to engage in the same way, so that consultations adopt some of the same kinds of openness approaches that we see businesses adopting and public groups adopting, with government trying to do those same sorts of things, government making its own materials available so that people can use, and reuse, and build for cultural, economic, and policy purposes, and for all kinds of different things.
In some of those areas it's low-hanging fruit. For me, in an ideal world we would simply get rid of crown copyright. I don't think it's appropriate to have to ask for permission to use government documents. But if we don't want to do that, we can do what the Australians have done, which is adopt a creative commons licence that says that anybody can use these government works for, particularly, non-commercial purposes without having to seek permission.
We don't have to even change the law. We just have to change the policy so that government begins doing the same kinds of things we're seeing in the private sector, and becoming, I think, more relevant in the lives of Canadians, and in a sense preparing itself for this new media world.