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About ID Requirements

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Registrars sometimes request copies of documents to verify your identity or contact information, such as government issued IDs and/or utility bills.

Registrars, through terms in their registration agreements, may request ID documents when:

  1. there is a reasonable dispute regarding the identity of a Registered Name holder in the following scenarios:

    1. The identity of the Registered Name Holder (or the Administrative Contact) of a domain name for a FOA (Standardized Form of Authorization); or

    2. The identity of the Registered Name Holder for an Auth-Code; or

  2. when investigating Whois inaccuracies either as required by the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) or for other business purposes.

If your registrar requested ID as part of a domain name transfer, and it is not for the reasons above, then please submit a Transfer Complaint.

The Transfer Policy has additional information regarding IDs and transferring domain names to another registrar.

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

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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."