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Assignment of Registry Agreement or Registry Operator Change of Control

Please note that the English language version of all translated content and documents are the official versions and that translations in other languages are for informational purposes only.

For registry operators subject to the base new gTLD Registry Agreement ("Registry Agreement"), any proposed assignment of the Registry Agreement or direct or indirect change of control of the registry operator must follow the process set forth in Section 7.5 of the Registry Agreement.

  • Assignment - occurs when the registry operator transfers any of its rights and/or obligations under the Registry Agreement to another entity. Assignments can be classified as:

    • Assignment to Affiliated Assignee
    • Assignment to Existing Registry Operator
    • Assignment to New Registry Operator
  • Change of Control - occurs when there is a change in the possession, directly or indirectly, of the power to direct or cause the direction of management or policies of the registry operator. Please refer to the definition of "control" in Section 2.9(c) of the Registry Agreement.

The review and approval processes for assignments or changes of control will follow related but distinct paths, which may vary depending on the specific set of circumstances surrounding the transaction. For further information and instructions on submitting a request, please visit the Assignment or Change of Control webpages.

If your request is related to a subcontracting arrangement of any Critical Function (as identified in Section 6 of Specification 10 of the Registry Agreement), please visit the Material Subcontracting Arrangement (MSA) change webpage for further details. When both an assignment of a Registry Agreement and MSA change are being contemplated simultaneously, please keep in mind the timing of submission because an MSA change request must be started and completed under the same registry operator.

ICANN organization encourages early engagement with your account manager when planning for these types of transactions to help you better understand the service request case(s) that may be applicable, including any timing considerations. To schedule a consultation call, registry operators may contact their account managers directly or open a General Inquiry case in the Naming Services portal. Note that any such inquiries shall not be considered notice of an assignment or change of control as required by the Registry Agreement.

Registry operators are not to construe any consultations with ICANN organization as legal, business or tax advice. Each registry operator should consult its own attorney, accountant or other professional advisors concerning legal, business, tax, or other matters concerning the proposed assignment or change of control. No statement contained herein shall be deemed to modify or supplement in any way the provisions of the Registry Agreement.This webpage and the various linked webpages herein are resources and guides only and by no means limits ICANN's rights provided under the Registry Agreements or limits ICANN in performing its diligence of the assignment requests.

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."