Register.com Announces Registration and Auction Services for European Multi-Lingual Domain Names

Business Wire, Feb 22, 2001

Business Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 22, 2001

For the first time, multi-lingual names can be registered

in over 42 European languages, including French,

Turkish, Russian and German

Register.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: RCOM), a leading provider of global domain registration and Internet services, today announced that European multi-lingual domain registration services are scheduled to launch on Saturday, February 24. The launch will enable real-time registrations for European domain names with specialized characters, such as accents, umlauts and tildes. In addition, Register.com customers will have exclusive access to the soon-to-be launched Afternic multi-lingual domain exchange, providing the most comprehensive multi-lingual domain marketplace available on the Internet.

As a participant of the multi-lingual test-bed, Register.com intends to be among the first registrars to provide multi-lingual registration for specialized European character domains directly from the Register.com web site, as well as through the Global Partner Network. European domain names are the most recent multi-lingual offering, and will be offered at an introductory retail price of $25 per name. In the coming weeks, the test bed is scheduled to expand to support additional characters, including Arabic and Hebrew.

"The launch of additional multi-lingual domains clearly shows that the Internet is expanding and adapting to represent a global user base, enabling Europeans to get domain names that truly reflect their languages for the first time in history," said Richard Forman, President and CEO of Register.com. "Register.com's registration services, coupled with its secondary market services, will give partners and customers the best array of tools with which to take advantage of this landmark opportunity."

Scheduled to launch between 8 p.m. and midnight EST, multi-lingual registrations will be available in Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and 29 additional languages. These multi-lingual domain names, as well as the previously launched domain names with Korean, Japanese and Chinese characters, will be supported on the Afternic domain exchange in the coming weeks. This will allow domain holders to list and sell the multilingual domains they've registered through Register.com, which will be featured in their own section on Afternic with an exclusive search engine.

As part of its multi-lingual registration launch, Register.com will also offer the following services:

Indirect Partner Network: Register.com's over 600 global partners will soon be able to offer their customers multi-lingual registrations using Register.com's Best SRS(TM) software. Register.com Global Partners translate and fully customize their own private label registration sites, enabling European partners to process domain name registrations in their local languages. For more information about the Register.com Global Partner Network, call 1-800-899-9705.

Corporate Brand Protection: Register.com will also provide specialized multilingual domain registration services to Register.com Corporate Customers, including high-volume registration, international brand protection and translation services for companies seeking to register trademarks and domains in all multi-lingual characters. For more information about Register.com's specialized multi-lingual corporate services, call 1-800-699-9638.

Online Dictionary Translation: Online dictionary translation services will be available for selected languages.

Prior to November 2000, the Domain Name System (DNS) only supported domain registrations for Roman-alphabet-based domain names. On November 10, the registry test-bed began processing multi-lingual registrations in Chinese, Japanese and Korean through a technology that translates non-Roman characters into ASCII-compatible representations for the purposes of routing multi-lingual names through the existing DNS. While domain registrations will be processed in real time, domains are only anticipated to resolve to IP addresses on the Internet in the coming months, with the assistance of iClient(TM) v3.0 free plug-in software.

Additional languages included in the European launch not already listed above include Afrikaans, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Esperanto, Estonian, Faerose, Finnish, Fisian, Flemish, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Provental, Romanian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Romany, Sami, Serbian, Slovak, Slovinian and Welsh. As with other .com, .net and .org domains, multi-lingual registrations will be processed on a first-come, first-serve basis.

About Register.com

Register.com, Inc. (www.Register.com) provides domain name registration and other Internet services for individuals and businesses that wish to have a unique address and a branded identity on the Internet. The first registrar to compete in the domain registration market after its deregulation in 1999, Register.com has processed over 3 million registrations across over 230 top level domains.