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About Not Being Able to Contact Your Registrar

My registrar is not responding to my inquiries.

ICANN does not have contractual authority to address customer-service related matters that fall outside of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), such as not responding to domain registrant inquiries.

Complaints about a registrar's performance that cannot be resolved with a registrar may be addressed by private-sector agencies involved in addressing customer complaints (i.e. the Better Business Bureau or the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network).

If you believe your complaint concerns what you think is an illegal matter, you may want to contact the appropriate law enforcement agency (which will vary depending on jurisdiction) or you may want to consult an attorney for legal advice.

I cannot find my registrar's contact information.

If you do not know your registrar's contact information, please check the ICANN-accredited Registrar list. This list has links to all registrars, and registrars are required by the RAA to publish accurate contact details (including email and postal mail). If there is no contact information on your registrar's website, please submit a Missing Registrar Contact Information Complaint.

If you're not sure who which registrar you used:

  • Conduct a Whois search at http://www.internic.net/whois.html.
    • Type in your domain name in the 'Whois Search' field, mark the 'Domain' option and click 'Submit.'
  • The registrar's name will be included in the results.

Learn more about common reasons to contact a registrar.

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."