The Handle System is a general-purpose global name service that is under development at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a not-for-profit research organization. The system tries to address several issues that DNS could not or is hard to overcome, including service scalability, namespace internationalization, and distributed administration. The Handle System defines a hierarchical namespace, a self-contained data and service model, and a specific protocol that supports both secured name resolution and administration over the Internet. It also proposes an interesting concept called "service information" vs. traditional server (or host) information used by most client/server applications. The "service information" allows multiple servers to be utilized as a single service unit for efficiency and scalability reasons.