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Registrar Mergers

If an ICANN-accredited registrar is involved in a merger, the registrar must provide ICANN with notice of the merger.

A registrar merger transaction could take two forms:

  • A merger of two ICANN-accredited registrars. In this instance, the registrars would merge into one ICANN-accredited registrar entity and the accreditation for the entity that ceases to exist would be terminated.
  • A merger of one ICANN-accredited registrar and a non-accredited entity. In this instance, the successor entity would remain or become (as applicable) ICANN-accredited.

For either type of merger, the registrar(s) must submit the following documentation to ICANN via courier or fax, or by email to registrarupdates@icann.org:

  1. A copy of the corporate merger agreement (which may be redacted to exclude confidential terms);
  2. Proof of incorporation and good-standing from the applicable business registration authority;
  3. The primary contact update form [PDF, 638 KB] (if changes are required); and
  4. As applicable:
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."