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Registrar Name Changes

The Registrar Accreditation Agreement requires registrars to notify ICANN of changes to their names within 30 days of that change.

If an ICANN-accredited registrar changes its company name, it should provide the official documentation of the company name change to ICANN via email to registrarupdates@icann.org, or by courier or fax.

Some examples of acceptable documentation include:

  • amended articles of incorporation (filed with the relevant registration authority, if applicable);
  • government-issued form or certificate of name change;
  • proof of name change from the business registration authority;
  • any other official document showing both the old and new names of the corporate entity.

If the registrar seeks to add a fictitious ("Doing Business As" or "DBA") name to the legal name published by ICANN on ICANN's websites, the registrar should submit:

  • a description of the legally-required steps the registrar took to do business under the fictitious name;
  • and, if applicable, the documents or forms used to create or register the fictitious name.

Once ICANN has received the appropriate documentation, ICANN will update the registrar's company name in its records and announce the name change to the registries.

The registrar is responsible for completing any requirements that registries may impose to document the name change.

If the name change is due to an assignment or change of control, please see the Transferring (Assigning) an ICANN Accreditation or Purchasing an ICANN-Accredited Registrar pages.

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."