Tucows OpenSRS Certified to Offer Multiligual Domain Name Registration

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October 19, 2000

New York, NY (Oct. 19) – Tucows Inc., the leading wholesale domain name registrar, became certified today to offer domain name registrations in simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean through its Tucows OpenSRS registration service.

Until now, the .com, .net, and .org registries have been limited to registering domain names using a strict ASCII character set. Thus, millions of registrants around the world have been unable to register domain names in their own language, in their own alphabet, even from their own standard computer keyboards. Likewise, registrants who operate primarily in English have been unable to extend their trademark to other languages.

However, VeriSign Global Registry Services, a division of VeriSign, Inc. (Nasdaq:VRSN), the registry operator for .com, .net. and org., is currently conducting a testbed with qualified registrars to extend DNS (Domain Name System) to support new character sets. Tucows’ certification indicates that it has successfully completed its test and will be ready to offer its customers registration capabilities in Chinese, Japanese and Korean once the testbed is completed on October 27 and the registry is ready to begin shortly thereafter.

Tucows’ customers include over 4,000 Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Internet Service Providers, Web hosting companies, Domain Name Resellers and others, all over the world, including hundreds in China, Japan and Korea. With Tucows’ certification, this unique channel of resellers is now also ready and waiting to deliver multilingual domain names to its millions of end user customers worldwide.

The Tucows OpenSRS wholesale model was built on the premise that its MSP partners would have a much greater opportunity than the leading retail domain name registrars to understand and serve the specific needs of their own local customers. This advantage should be particularly relevant in the race to register multilingual domain names.

Tucows is also one of the few leading registrar that has developed its own conversion solution (in complete accordance with the Internet Engineering Task Force ) to perform multilingual registrations. This will offer Tucows and its MSP partners several significant advantages over competition that will need to outsource that solution, including greater quality control, stability, and robustness, and, most importantly, maximum flexibility in offering this registration service to end users.

“Internet users around the world have waited anxiously for the opportunity to register domain names in their own languages,” said Tucows CEO Elliot Noss. “With a superior technical solution and Managed Service Provider partners living and doing business in every market in the world, Tucows is clearly in a unique position to answer the call.”

About Tucows

Tucows is a leading distributor of e-business services and applications on the Internet. With a network of more than 4,000 Managed Service Providers (Internet Service Providers, Web hosting companies, Domain Name Resellers and others) in more than 100 countries around the world, we believe Tucows is the largest network of its kind. The Tucows site offers over 30,000 software titles in libraries located around the world, providing users with a fast local download. Tucows Inc. is an ICANN-accredited registrar. Tucows is the leading provider of wholesale domain name registrations and related services in the world. For more information, please visit: http://www.opensrs.org or http://partner.tucows.com or go to https://www.tucows.com and click on Partner Home.