Tucows Inc. is an American-Canadian

publicly traded A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of share capital, stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) co ...

Internet services and telecommunications company headquartered in

Toronto, Ontario Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

, and incorporated in

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania, officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a U.S. state, state spanning the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern United States, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes region, Great Lakes regions o ...

, United States. The company is composed of three independent businesses: Tucows Domains, Ting Internet, and Wavelo. Originally founded in 1993 as a

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. ...

and

freeware Freeware is software, often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the free ...

software download site, Tucows shuttered its downloads business in 2021. Tucows Domains is the second-largest domain registrar worldwide and operates OpenSRS, Ascio, and Hover. In 2012, Tucows launched Ting Mobile, a wireless service provider and used the same brand to launch its

fiber Fiber (spelled fibre in British English; from ) is a natural or artificial substance that is significantly longer than it is wide. Fibers are often used in the manufacture of other materials. The strongest engineering materials often inco ...

Internet provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non ...

business Ting Internet in 2015. In 2020, Tucows sold its wireless business to

Dish Network DISH Network L.L.C., often referred to as DISH, an abbreviation for Digital Sky Highway, is an American provider of satellite television and IPTV services and wholly owned subsidiary of EchoStar Corporation. The company was originally establ ...

, while they continued to operate Ting Internet. The billing platform Tucows built for Ting Mobile was spun off into an independent OSS/BSS SaaS business, Wavelo. The company was formed in

Flint Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Historically, flint was widely used to make stone tools and start ...

Michigan Michigan ( ) is a peninsular U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, Upper Midwestern United States. It shares water and land boundaries with Minnesota to the northwest, Wisconsin to the west, ...

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

, in 1993. The Tucows logo was two cow heads, a play on the

homophone A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning or in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (past tense of "rise"), or spelled differently, a ...

"two cows".

Origins

Scott Swedorski, a Flint native, started working as a computer lab manager at Flint's Mott Community College in 1991. By late 1992, Swedorski left Mott College to work at the Genesee County Library System as a system administrator for FALCON (Flint Area Library Cooperative Online Network) and saw a need to bring shareware reviews to the public. In 1993 he formed TUCOWS (The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock SoftwareAl Harberg
DP Director. "TUCOWS' founder and president Scott Swedorski announced earlier this week that he has resigned from TUCOWS"
November 30, 2003.) leading all editorial, reviews, HTML programming and scripting.

Company history

In the early 1990s, Tucows was hosted on university and public servers (much like Yahoo! and Google were in their early stages). TUCOWS' mission was to provide users with downloads of both

and trial versions of

. Internet Direct, owned and operated by John Nemanic, Bill Campbell, and Colin Campbell, acquired Tucows in 1996. STI Ventures acquired Tucows in 1999. The company employed roughly 30 employees in

, in 1998 with additional employees in Canada. For several years Scott Swedorski personally oversaw day-to-day activity in the Flint office located in the White House building on Beecher Road. In 2000, Tucows acquired ''Linux Weekly News'' (which was then "unacquired" in 2002). In 2001, Tucows was acquired by

Infonautics Infonautics, Inc. was an information services company, founded in 1992 by Marvin Weinberger, Lawrence Husick, and Josh Kopelman, and had its headquarters in Wayne, Pennsylvania, United States. It was a spin-out from Telebase, Inc., which retained ...

, which then changed its name to Tucows,Paula J. Hane
"Tucows Sells Two Former Infonautics Services"
''Information Today'', August 26, 2002. a business tactic called a "

reverse takeover A reverse takeover (RTO), reverse merger, or reverse IPO is the acquisition of a public company by a private company so that the private company can bypass the lengthy and complex process of going public. Sometimes, conversely, the public compa ...

". On August 26, 2002, Tucows sold eLibrary and

Encyclopedia.com ''Encyclopedia.com'' is an online encyclopedia. It aggregates information, images, and videos from other published dictionaries, encyclopedias, and reference works. History The website was launched by Infonautics in March 1998. Infonautics w ...

, its search and reference services properties inherited from Infonautics, to Alacritude.

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

preserves a full copy of the Tucows Software Library, with thousands of software titles both in the latest versions, as well as in older versions not yet available through Tucows. In 2004, Tucows acquired Boardtown Corporation, a billing software provider based in

Starkville, Mississippi Starkville is a city in and the county seat of Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, United States. As of the 2020 United States census, Starkville's population is 24,360, making it the 16th-most populated city in Mississippi. Starkville is the largest ...

. On August 19, 2005, Tucows went public, after completing a secondary offering, listing on the

Toronto Stock Exchange The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX; ) is a stock exchange located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the List of stock exchanges, 10th largest exchange in the world and the third largest in North America based on market capitalization. Based in th ...

as TC and the

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market (; National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list ...

as TCX. In January 2006, Tucows completed its acquisition of certain assets of Critical Path, an outsourced email services provider. In June 2006 Tucows paid $18 million to purchase Mailbank.com Inc, a company that owns over 17,000 domain names for common surnames, such as smith.net and brown.org. Mailbank generates income from ads on its websites (from

domain parking Domain parking is the registration of an Internet domain name without that domain being associated with any services such as e-mail or a website. This may have been done with a view to reserving the domain name for future development, and to pr ...

) and also from customers who want e-mail accounts with their surname in the domain name. On June 15, 2006, Noss disclosed that the portfolio of NetIdentity's domain names acquired by Tucows represents at least 68% of surnames in the United States and Europe, and that the cost of the acquisition was $18 million."Tucows Podcast on Its NetIdentity Acquisition - Transcript"
'' Seeking Alpha'', June 15, 2006. On February 19, 2008, Tucows announced that they were launching a "Personal Names Service" using their portfolio of 39,000 domain names. "The launch of the Personal Names Service marks the complete integration of the surname assets we acquired with NetIdentity into our wholesale channel", said Elliot Noss, President and CEO of Tucows."Tucows Launches Personal Names Service"
Tucows Press Release, February 19, 2008. On August 26, 2006, Tucows won an

eBay eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. ...

auction for the web calendar site Kiko.com. The company planned to roll Kiko's features into their existing email platform. On July 27, 2007, Tucows acquired ItsYourDomain.com (IYD), another privately held

ICANN The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is a global multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several dat ...

-accredited wholesale registrar offering domain services through a network of over 2,500 affiliates with over 700,000 domains under management, paying US$10.35 million.Jay Westerdal
"ItsYourDomain acquired by Tucows"
Domain Tools, July 30, 2007 ItsYourDomain.com managed 699,951 domains compared to Tucows's 5,919,987, at the time of the sale in July 2007 ItsYourDomain.com's monthly growth of 29,181 exceeded Tucows growth of 21,126. By June 2008, Tucows had a total of three domain name registration services called ItsYourDomain (IYD), NetIdentity, and DomainDirect. Tucows decided to discontinue these three services, and merge them into one new domain name registration service, called Hover. Hover is a simple domain name registration service powered by Tucows Inc, that started in July 2008. All IYD, DomainDirect, and NetIdentity customers are fulfilled by Hover.com. On November 6, 2008, Tucows announced that they were launching Butterscotch.com, an online video network with video tutorials to explain Internet technology, starting with 35 video tutorials and plans to reach 500 clips by Spring 2009.
Canadian PR Newswire, November 6, 2008. On October 14, 2011, Butterscotch.com producer Sean Carruthers stated production had been shut down. In December 2014, Tucows launched RealNames, offering e-mail service using domain names acquired from Mailbank.com Inc. On January 20, 2017, the company acquired eNom for $83.5 million, making Tucows the second-largest domain registrar in the world. The company announced in January 2021 it was shuttering its Downloads business, as it was no longer essential to the rest of the company's business, but had transferred all of its assets and content to the

prior to its closure.

Business lines

In July 2008, Tucows rebranded its wholesale services as "Open SRS". "Re-introducing OpenSRS"
Open SRS Reseller Blog, July 28, 2008. As of July 2023, Tucows is the third-largest accredited registrar in the world.

Domain portfolio management

Tucows has three sources of income from its domain portfolio: 1) Advertising from pages of domains within their domain name portfolio; 2) Sales of domains from their portfolio, which is constantly being replenished;
PRNewswire-FirstCall, June 19, 2007. 3) Auction of the steady stream of thousands of domain names that expire every day and become available for resale. On November 14, 2007, Tucows disclosed that they offer pay-per-click advertising on the pages of domains within their domain name portfolio. When a user types one of these domain names into the address of the browser (direct navigation), they are presented with dynamically generated links which are pay-per-click advertising. Every time a user clicks on one of the links listed on a web page, it generates revenue for Tucows through its partnership with third parties who provide syndicated pay-per-click results.SEC Filings for TCX. "Form 10-Q for TUCOWS INC /PA/"
November 14, 2007. On February 7, 2008, Tucows disclosed that it had switched from Google Ads to a new advertising partner in 2007, which led to a one-third increase in its revenue."Tucows Inc. Q4 2007 Earnings Call Transcript"
''Seeking Alpha'', February 7, 2008. On May 7, 2008, Tucows announced it put a process in place for the regular sale of direct navigation names. "Tucows Inc. Q1 2008 Earnings Call Transcript"
''Seeking Alpha'', May 7, 2008. These domain names would come from names that expire each month from customers who decide they no longer want the domain names and that Tucows is able to select the ones they want to keep from these domain names."RBC Capital Markets Growth Conference"
, Tucows Presentation, October 27, 2008. Tucows announced on June 12, 2008, that they have reached an agreement with Afternic to auction Tucows’ large daily inventory of expired domain names. "We have over eight million domains under management and thousands expiring every day, so this deal provides us with a great way to share revenue with our resellers while participating in Afternic’s popular secondary domain name marketplace”, said Bill Sweetman, General Manager of Tucows Domain Portfolio. "Tucows Collaborates With Namemedia’s Afternic.Com To Auction Daily Inventory Of Expired Domain Names"
, Tucows Press Release, June 12, 2008. Tucows will share 10% of the gross sale price with the reseller for the sale of expired domains that were originally registered through the reseller. Revenue will be shared automatically without the reseller having to take any additional action. "Tucows and Afternic.com Team Up for Expired Domain Auction"
, Tucows Corporate blog, June 12, 2008. Tucows chose Afternic as a partner even though SnapNames with Register.com and NameJet with NetSol/eNom are the dominant players in expired domains. "Tucows and Afternic Deal Q&A"
Domain Name Wire, June 12, 2008. On October 29, 2008, Tucows announced that it would begin direct sales from their inventory of premium domain names under the brand name of Yummy Names. The service was created especially for marketers to obtain a high-quality domain name from Tucows inventory. Customers have the option of purchasing a premium domain name outright or leasing the name. In 2009 one of Tucows' subsidiaries, Buydomains Holdings, sold another premium

domain name In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services, and more. ...

for a record $50,000 for Myhomepage.com. On February 20, 2008, Tucows announced a portfolio of over 1,000 domain names that have the high potential value such as "Jewellers.com", "Actresses.com", "BasketballPlayers.com", and "ProjectManagers.com". In February 2008, Tucows successfully defended against an arbitration proceeding over Batchelor.com, which it had acquired as part of its NetIdentity purchase. The complaint had been filed by Ken Batchelor Cadillac Company, a car dealership. A National Arbitration Forum panel determined that the dealership had not established rights in the mark "Batchelor". In fact, Tucows has won all surname-related arbitration proceedings. In 2007, Weidner Investment Services filed a complaint claiming that Weidner was its

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a form of intellectual property that consists of a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination that identifies a Good (economics and accounting), product or Service (economics), service f ...

service mark A service mark or servicemark is a trademark used in the United States and several other countries to identify a Service (economics), service rather than a product (business), product. When a service mark is federally registered, the standard ...

and asked the National Arbitration Forum to order the transfer of Weidner.com from Tucows to Weidner. Tucows failed to respond, and the National Arbitration Forum ordered Tucows to transfer Weidner.com to Weidner Investment Services."''Weidner Investment Services, Inc. v. Tucows.com Co.''" Claim Number: FA0709001080246
National Arbitration Forum, November 7, 2007. In January 2017, eNom was sold to Canadian domain seller Tucows for $83.5M Canadian.

Email services

Tucows provides millions of email boxes through their network of over 9,000 service providers. "Tucows Announces Enhancement to the Tucows Email Service"
Tucows Press Release, January 31, 2008. Customers of Tucows fully hosted email service are provided with POP3, IMAP, WAP and webmail access. Providers using Tucows Email Service have the option of using Tucows' spam and virus filtering with their current email infrastructure. As part of the NetIdentity acquisition, Tucows had problems migrating retail customers' email from a third-party provider to Tucows in-house mail systems in September 2006.Joel Shore
"System migration may be the most dangerous thing you ever do"
''IT World'', September 26, 2006. Starting August 12, 2008, Tucows Email Service running on their servers designated as Cluster A experienced a multi-day outage lasting until August 15, 2008. On October 6, 2008, Cluster A again suffered another multi-day outage affecting at least 50% of users and at times all users. As of the afternoon of October 9, 2008, this cluster was still partially down ("degraded") preventing an unknown number of users from being able to retrieve email.

Retail services

Tucows sells services to consumers and small businesses and offers personalized email through net identity. Tucows also offers customers hosting and other services with NetIdentity. Tucows also expected to receive income for pay per click advertising revenue from

the surnames.

Mobile phone services

In February 2012, Tucows launched a new

mobile virtual network operator A mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) is a wireless communications services provider that does not own the wireless network infrastructure over which it provides services to its customers. An MVNO enters into a business agreement with a mobil ...

in the United States known as Ting, which resells voice and data services on the

T-Mobile US T-Mobile US, Inc. is an American wireless network operator headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. Its majority shareholder and namesake is the German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom. T-Mobile is the second largest wireless carrie ...

network. As of July 2018, the service had approximately 286,000 subscribers. In 2017, Tucows acquired Canadian MVNO Roam Mobility from Otono Networks. Roam Mobility ran for three years until it was shut down in June 2020, likely due to travel slowdown from the

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In January 2020, the disease spread worldwide, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic. The symptoms of COVID‑19 can vary but often include fever ...

pandemic. On August 3, 2020, Tucows announced that it would sell the Ting Mobile business to

(owner of Boost Mobile) and serve as its provider of backend services for its new wireless businesses. As of 2022, Tucows no longer runs its mobile phone service and has shifted focus to software enablement for other providers.

Internet services

On December 15, 2014, Tucows announced its acquisition of the

Charlottesville, Virginia Charlottesville, colloquially known as C'ville, is an independent city (United States), independent city in Virginia, United States. It is the county seat, seat of government of Albemarle County, Virginia, Albemarle County, which surrounds the ...

ISP Blue Ridge InternetWorks, which was building a

fiber to the home Fiber to the ''x'' (FTTX; also spelled "fibre") or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic ...

network. The services were brought under Tucows' Ting branding. They began offering symmetrical gigabit fiber internet without bandwidth caps. Since expanding the existing fiber network in Charlottesville, Ting Internet is currently in 12 markets with more on the way.

Software (SaaS)

In January 2022, Tucows launched Wavelo, a

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike o ...

(SaaS) company that builds telecom billing and operations software for Mobile Virtual Network Operators and Fiber Internet Services. They have two products: MONOS (Mobile Network Operating System) currently used by

and ISOS (Internet Services Operating System) currently used by Ting Internet.

De-emphasis and divestment of business lines

De-emphasis of software downloads

Tucows maintained a download archive that included more than 30,000 software titles in its worldwide network of partner sites. Although some listing features now have fees, basic listing remains free. Tucows founder Scott Swedorski announced his resignation in November 2003. On March 10, 2006, Tucows Content division closed its satellite office located in

, and relocated the remaining editorial functions to its corporate head office in Toronto. On February 7, 2008, Tucows disclosed that Tucows plans to de-emphasize the software download aspect of their business. The download service was finally closed down in January 2021.

Divestment of web hosting accounts

On May 6, 2008, Tucows announced that they are getting out of the web hosting business. "Hostopia to acquire certain shared hosting customer assets of Tucows Retail Service Group"
Tucows Press Release, May 6, 2008. As part of the divestment Tucows signed an agreement for Hostopia to purchase about 14,000 Domain Direct, NetIdentity and ItsYourDomain.com (IYD) customer web hosting accounts and would migrate the web hosting accounts to Hostopia's unified web service platform by July 2008.

Divestment of equity interest in Afilias

On November 5, 2008, Tucows announced that it was selling its entire 7.38% equity interest in

Afilias Afilias, Inc. was a US corporation that was the registry operator of the .info, .mobi and .pro top-level domain, service provider for registry operators of .org, .ngo, .lgbt, .asia, .aero, and a provider of domain name registry services f ...

for $7.4 million. Afilias is the registry operator of the .info and .aero TLDs, and the service provider of the .org

generic top-level domain Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet. A top-level domain is the last level of ev ...

(gTLD), .mobi mobile phone TLD, and a provider of domain name registry services for several countries around the world, including .AG (Antigua and Barbuda), .BZ (Belize), .GI (Gibraltar), .HN (Honduras), .IN (India), .ME (Montenegro), .SC (the Seychelles), and .VC (St. Vincent and the Grenadines).

Reputation

Domain name add grace period (AGP) abuse

On January 8, 2008, Tucows explained its values and position on domain name front running: "We work to uphold the rights of Registrants. That means, for example, not putting 60-day locks on domains when a Registrant makes a change to their

WHOIS WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase "who is") is a query and response protocol that is used for querying databases that store an Internet resource's registered users or assignees. These resources include domain names, IP address blocks and autonomo ...

information effectively locking some into a renewal and blocking domain name transfers to other Registrars. That also means having a clear, defined policy surrounding expiry and redemption periods." Tucows addresses domain tasting "by charging our Resellers a monetary fee on domain name registrations that are cancelled within the five-day Add Grace Period (AGP)", but it "doesn’t use WHOIS query data or search data from our

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

to front-run domain names".James Koole
"Registrar Reputation and Trust"
, January 8, 2008. Although it supports

’s fee to discourage domain tasting and

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

's decision to drop names added and deleted during the AGP from its

AdSense Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These adver ...

program, Tucows claimed that AGP abuse could be further curbed by shortening the AGP period to 12 hours or less, sufficient time for registrants to correct spelling mistakes—AGP's original purpose.Adam Eisner
"ICANN Proposed Tasting Fee a Good First Step"
, Tucows Blog, January 30, 2008.

Registrations to sites selling illegal goods and connections to terrorism

In 2015, the U.S. Trade Representative included Tucows on its annual "notorious markets" list—the first time it has named a domain name registrar—in order to set an example for what happens to registrars that do not block or suspend sites that sell illegal goods. Tucows responded that it suspended dozens of sites every day, but that "unlike some competitors, it considered all complaints carefully to ensure they were justified". Tucows used to be the domain name registrar for the notorious American imageboard 8chan, which has been delisted by Google for hosting child pornography, and also seen numerous swatting attacks and terrorist attacks announced and planned by users, notably the 2019 New Zealand Terror Attack. It is also a domain name registrar for the social media platform Truth Social and the white nationalist website Stormfront. in 2021, Tucows launched a framework to explain their role in dealing with domain name abuse.

References

External links

Tucows Corporate Website
{{authority control Companies listed on the Nasdaq Companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange Companies formerly listed on NYSE American Software companies of Canada 2005 initial public offerings Software companies established in 1993 1993 establishments in Michigan Companies based in Toronto