.NU Domain Leads Charge in Developing New Internet Standards Consortium for Multilingual Domain Names

Business Wire, April 7, 2000

Business/Technology Editors

MEDFIELD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 7, 2000

International Body to be Modeled on World Wide Web Consortium

(W3C) to Fast-Track Standards for Japanese, Chinese and other

Non-English Domain Names

.NU Domain Ltd (www.whats.nu), one of the fastest growing Top Level Domains (TLDs) on the Internet, announced today that J. William Semich, its president and CEO, is coordinating the creation of the Multilingual Internet Name Consortium (MINC), a new consortium that is working towards creating standards for supporting use of non-English multilingual names on the Internet. The initial organizing meeting for the consortium will be held Monday, March 27, during the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) conference in Adeliade, Australia.

The organizers plan to discuss initial requirements for such a consortium, including the development of bylaws and selection of a potential location for a central office or "secretariat", as well as research and development on multilingual names, deployment of multilingual names on the internet, compatibility testing of various multilingual name services and software, coordination with the relevant organizations and coordination for standards development on multilingual names.

"Support for use of multilingual names on the Internet is critical to ensure that the Internet continues to be used globally and is easily accessible for all," said Semich. .NU Domain recently announced its development of NUBIND(TM), a leading, standards-based service for using multilingual domain names in the .NU top level domain, and has begun accepting registration of non-English domain names in the .NU domain name space (see http://ww.nunames.nu/eu-land-test.htm).

"By participating in the launch of this new consortium, we expect .NU Domain and our NUBIND(TM) service to be able to meet all protocol standards as they evolve, and to be compatible with all other compliant multilingual services as they become available," added Semich.

So far, .NU Domain is the only TLD in the world to accept active registrations of domain names that use all the UNICODE characters in the world, and not just the English-language alphabet.

This newly formed consortium was initiated by a group of Asia-Pacific Internet associations, including the Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG), Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Forum (APTLD) and Asia Pacific Internet Association (APIA). Semich is chairman of the APTLD's iName committee, which is charged with developing initiatives to promote use of Internationalized domain names and keywords on the Internet.

The new consortium is expected to consist of a number of organizations and qualified individuals including leading software companies, Internet Service Providers (ISP's), regional organizations, TLD administrators, user organizations, and public organizations. Representatives from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, North America, and Europe will be present at the meeting to begin the discussions. Representatives from China, Taiwan, Thailand, India and other areas are expected to participate via teleconference.

The consortium will also cooperate with the relevant global and regional organizations such as IETF, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Unicode Consortium, IEEE, ISO and ITU.

About .NU Domain Ltd

.NU Domain Ltd, a US-based private corporation, offers the leading competitive alternative to Network Solutions Inc.'s. (NASDAQ:NSOL) ".com" domain name. The company is focused on serving end users and the small office/home office (SOHO) market, as well as Internet users in countries with restrictions on the domain name registration process.

The .NU domain is the fastest growing Top Level Domain (TLD) on the Internet. It has registered more than 66,000 .NU domain names on the Internet during the past 26 months. .NU Domain Ltd also offers domain name parking services for customers who need to lock in a domain name but have no immediate plans to use it. Find further information about .NU and other services that the company provides at: www.nunames.nu

Current .NU customers are located in dozens of countries throughout the world, including Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Japan, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Canary Islands, Spain, Brazil, New Zealand, Indonesia, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines and Australia, in addition to the United States. The list of registered .NU names ranges from addresses for large corporations such as the International Data Group (www.idg.nu) and the Coca-Cola Company (www.coca-cola.nu) to smaller organizations such as the Swedish floor ball team Sodra Karr (www.SodraKarr.nu).

.NU Domain is a trademark of .NU Domain Ltd All others companies and products are trademarks of their respective companies.