WorldNames, Inc. Ships Ready-to-Run Multilingual Domain Name Registration System for NSI Registrars.

Business/Technology Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 27, 2000

World-Class, Field Tested Multilingual DNS Technology Enables

Registrars for .COM, .NET and .ORG to Start Accepting Registrations

of Chinese, Japanese and Korean Domain Names in Early October

WorldNames, Inc., a leading provider of Domain Name infrastructure services and multilingual technologies, today announced that its MultiLingual Domain Name System (MLDNS(TM)) is now available for use by the NSI Registrar community. This world-class, field tested technology will enable ICANN-accredited registrars to start registering .COM, .NET and .ORG domain names using local language character sets, beginning with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean by next week.

VeriSign Global Registry Services (formerly known as NSI Registry), a VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) company, has announced that next week it will launch a testbed for accredited NSI registrars to begin accepting registrations of .COM, .NET and .ORG domain names using the Chinese, Japanese and Korean character sets. The patent-pending WorldNames MLDNS (TM) system, or technologies similar to it, will be required for any NSI Registrar to be able to participate in that testbed (see http://www.nsiregistry.com/multilingual/announce/techinfo.html).

Presently, anyone who registers a domain name in .COM, .NET and .ORG can only use English language characters when registering their domain names. With nearly 50% of today's 336 million Internet users coming from non-English speaking countries, using only English (ASCII) characters is no longer acceptable. The inability to use local characters in domain names limits branding efforts for local businesses in China, for example, and creates frustration for users trying to locate non-English named companies on the web.

WorldNames also announced the release of a semi-general public license (GPL) source code license for MLBIND(TM), its multilingual version of BIND, the defacto-standard DNS software currently used by 75% of all Internet sites. The open source code license is available to all ICANN Certified Registrars for .COM, .NET and .ORG, regardless of whether they use the complete WorldNames MLDNS(TM) system.

Said J. William Semich, WorldNames founder and president, "We decided to make sure this important technology becomes available quickly to the domain name registrar and registry community, so we are granting a limited open source code license for MLBIND to all the key providers of domain name services on the Internet." The no-cost source code license is available to all ICANN-approved domain name technology providers, including the Internet's Root Server managers; the managers of any top level domain (current or future approved gTLD and ccTLD managers), as well as the Certified Registrars. License terms are available at http://www.worldnames.net/MLDNS.

According to Dr. Paul V. Mockapetris, who serves as technical advisor to WorldNames, Inc., "We are glad to be providing multilingual technology to the .COM, .NET and .ORG world. It's high time that we all got serious about internationalization. Maybe a bit of running code will help push along the acceptance of the standards." Dr. Mockapetris is former chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the inventor of the Internet's Domain Name System.

WorldNames' MLDNS(TM) is Unicode-based and supports all the established multilingual encoding standards, including ISO-10646 (UTF-8), which has been adopted by Microsoft (in its Windows ME and Windows 2000 operating systems and Internet Explorer browsers), Netscape (in Netscape 6) and the Unicode Consortium, as well as emerging ASCII-based universal encoding draft standards such as RACE (Row-based ASCII Compatible Encoding - see http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-race-01.txt), and any of the requirements set by Verisign Global Registry Services for multilingual domain name registrations.

MLDNS(TM) includes four software components, all of which are necessary to give domain name users access to a fully functioning multilingual domain name on the Internet:

1.       ML Conversion Server(TM), a technology needed by domain name
         registrars to verify non-English domain names prior to
         accepting them for registration, and required to properly
         encode and transform any local language encoding (Japanese
         Shift_JIS or EUC, Chinese BIG5 or Traditional, Korean, Arabic
         CP, ISO-8859-X, and scores of other local encoding standards)
         into the standardized UNICODE character set for further
         transformation in the UTF-8 and RACE character encoding
         systems.
2.       ML Whois Server(TM), which accepts queries from Internet
         users in any local language encoding and responds with the
         correct information about a registered ML Domain name just as
         current Whois servers respond when queried about English
         language domain names.
3.       ML Webrouter(TM), a lightweight, robust HTTP server which can
         accept HTTP requests using any local language encoding,
         transform the queries into UNICODE/UTF-8 or RACE and redirect
         the http requests to any ASCII-based web site, such as a
         Geocities or Homestead site, while still preserving the
         appropriate local language encoding in the URL.
4.       ML BIND(TM), a fully multilingual enabled version of BIND
         8.2.2 Patch 5, the defacto-standard DNS software currently
         used by 75% of all Internet sites. This world-class
         technology, which supports domain names registered in all
         living languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
         Arabic, Hebrew, Icelandic, and Cyrillic has been field tested
         for the past 9 months at http://www.worldnames.net, with
         thousands of multilingual names already registered and
         working on the Internet.

WorldNames, Inc.'s MultiLingual DNS system has been under development for over a year, and is currently being used to accept complete multilingual domain name registrations and to provide DNS services for the .NU and .AS top level domains, with support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic and all other non-English language character sets supported by the UNICODE standard. WorldNames is participating in the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) IDN working group responsible for developing standards for multilingual technology, and is a founding member of the Multilingual Internet Name Consortium (MINC). Based on UNICODE and ISO-10646/UTF8, MLDNS(TM) has been designed to easily migrate to any multilingual DNS standard adopted by the IETF.

About WorldNames

WorldNames, Inc., a US-based private corporation, provides Internet DNS applications services to the Top Level Domain registry and registrar business community. The company was launched to provide cost-efficient DNS technical support, infrastructure support and applications services to gTLDs and to ccTLDs which are migrating to a more commercial structure. Strategic partners and technical service providers for WorldNames, Inc. include .NU Domain, Ltd; NameEngine, Inc.; Genuity/BBN; Telia AB; AboveNet; Telstra/Netlink; and GDNS, Inc.

For examples of WorldNames Multilingual Web Address Services on the Internet or to register your own Multilingual Web Address(TM)see: http://www.worldnames.net