Having recently read Download.com’s announcement on excluding adware from their catalogue, I was surprised to see no one mentioning that Tucows have been banning both adware and spyware for the last 6 years.

As Matthew Bleicher, Tucows Manager wrote:

Tucows has done this for close to six years when we first discovered the concept of “intrusive adware,” or what is now known as spyware. At that time there were no anti-spyware programs to run checks for us…We ran the programs and checked to see if any odd or unexpected behavior occurred. The result was no doubt not perfect, but we caught many programs and prevented them from being on-site.

Although Download.com or CNET have rather dominated the software market in recent years, many of us first associated the Tucows brand with software (shareware) downloads. While they have continued to build this software service, Tucows has been busy innovating and branching out into other areas.

For example their highly successful OpenSRS domain registry service has turned them into the world’s largest supplier of wholesale domain names, counting Ev1servers and 123-reg.co.uk among their customers. Their recent purchase of blogrolling shows that they are on the ball with current trends. More importantly their successful handling of this product after the purchase has been excellent, allaying many bloggers fears that ‘big business’ would ruin a service they enjoyed.

I’ve been connected with Tucows from my early days with Mike Beveridge at Enhance Software, promoting their HTML editor eHTML*, through to the current day where e3internet work with them as a domain registrar. For over 6 years I have had some connection to this company.

It’s interesting with all this recent talk of Google and post-IPO ethics to find a company who has successfully managed to follow the ‘Do No Evil’ path – without making a song and dance about it. A lot of this has come from honest communications with their resellers and customers, something which seem to be strangely lacking from Google at the moment.

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