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Registering Domain Names

Domain names under generic Top-Level Domain Names (gTLDs) may be registered with one of more than two thousand ICANN-accredited registrars, or their resellers. Registrars are accredited by ICANN organization and certified by the registries to sell domain names. They are bound by the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) with ICANN organization, and by their agreements with the registries. Resellers are organizations affliated with or under are under contract with registrars to sell domain names and other services offered by the registrar such as web hosting or email mailboxes. Resellers are bound by their agreements with the registrars whose services they sell and are not accredited by ICANN organization. The registrars remain responsible and accountable for all domain names sold by their resellers. ICANN organization maintains a list of current ICANN-accredited registrars on our website.

Domain name registrations under country-code Top-Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) can be made through the ccTLD operators.

This web page aggregates existing content across the icann.org website on the topic of registering a domain name. If you have suggestions or would like to submit an inquiry, please contact ICANN organization's Global Support Center's Global Support Center.

Contractual compliance complaints can be submitted here.

What is a domain name?

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."