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About Transfer to a New Registrar

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Consistent with ICANN's obligation to promote and encourage robust competition in the domain name space, the Transfer Policy aims to provide a procedure for domain name holders to transfer their names from one ICANN-accredited registrar to another. The policy also provides standardized requirements for registrar handling of such transfer requests from domain name holders.

If you are one of the Transfer Contacts (such as registered name holder/registrant or administrative contact listed in the Whois information), you can transfer a domain name to the registrar of your choice listed on the ICANN-accredited Registrars webpage.

For the procedure that registrars must follow to transfer a domain name (including the limited exceptions when a registrar may or must deny a transfer), please refer to the Transfer Policy.

If your request to transfer a domain name to a different registrar was unsuccessful for a reason not allowed by the Transfer Policy or if you believe the registrar failed to follow the required procedure, please submit a Transfer Complaint.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."