Last month at CIRA’s annual general meeting, I had the pleasure of meeting Tracy Axelsson, the executive director of the Vancouver Community Network. Her organization is working to connect street-involved citizens in downtown Vancouver with critical life-saving information via SMS messages. Chatting about her program was a vivid reminder for me of what many technology companies around the world have recognized, that the benefits of our wares can have a profound impact on our economies, culture and social fabric of our countries.

As Canada’s ccTLD (country code top level domain), CIRA is responsible for managing the .CA domain on behalf of all Canadians. As such, we hold a privileged position in the Canadian Internet ecosystem. For CIRA, finding ways to improve the Internet experience for Canadians has been a top-of-mind issue. And we are not alone.

The announcement of this year’s finalists for the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR) awards demonstrates that access is a key issue for our peers as well. The finalists in the categories of security, R&D, marketing, contributor of the year and corporate social responsibility (CSR), share a common underpinning of desire, particularly in the latter category—to improve the ability for their stakeholders to benefit from advances in digital technology.

Corporate social responsibility is no longer reserved for the private sector. As ccTLDs have grown their stakeholder communities over the last decade, many are examining ways to reinvest profits directly back into the communities they represent. For ccTLDs, the goals are often marked by three things: making the Internet more secure; facilitating higher quality connections; and helping to secure equal access and use for all. How this looks in practice depends on the context.

Fundació PuntCAT’s “Browse in Catalan,” is among the three finalists in the CENTR awards CSR category. The TLD .cat developed a program supporting the cultural preservation and cultural sovereignty of the Catalan people. By empowering stakeholders to search the Internet in their unique language, Browse in Catalan is about ensuring that the global Internet has a space for the unique cultural perspectives of the Catalan people. .CAT is helping create a home for Catalan online.

In Ireland, a country which has been hit hard by the global recession, ccTLD IEDR, which operates the .ie domain, focused its CSR program on maximizing the potential of e-commerce to help small businesses tap new markets. IEDR has been showcased as a finalist in CENTR’s CSR category for the development of “Optimise IEDR”, an e-commerce program to help small and medium-sized businesses realize their online potential.

CIRA is also honoured to be among the three finalists in the CSR category. In 2014, we launched the .CA Community Investment Program. To date, we have provided $2.2 million in funding to 54 diverse initiatives in media literacy, online services, academic research and infrastructure.

In this same vein, we have been able to make great gains in the creation of media literacy programming in Canada, filling an obvious and pressing need. We’ve committed funding to teaching computer coding, hardware engineering and online safety to young Canadians; helping to empower the next generation of technology leaders.

We believe that harnessing the power of the Internet has the potential to change and enrich Canadians lives. In addition to providing essential funding though the .CA Community Investment Program, we’re helping to get resources to the committed volunteers and non-profit leaders building Canada’s national Internet infrastructure—including investing in the completion of a truly pan-Canadian IXP network to improve speed and data sovereignty for Canadian individuals and entities.

The Internet helps people and is essential to our daily lives. At CIRA, we are in a privileged position to ensure our stakeholders can maximise the benefits. The CENTR awards are an opportunity to view best practices among our peers. They offer a chance to celebrate the significant influence our organizations can have in the lives of local community members, and they provide an opportunity to learn, to develop, and to harness the power of the Internet and, ultimately, to make it work better for everyone.