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Terminating a Registry-Registrar Agreement

Please note that the English language version of all translated content and documents are the official versions and that translations in other languages are for informational purposes only.

ICANN-accredited registrars and registry operators who elect to terminate a Registry-Registrar Agreement (RRA) should provide ICANN org at least thirty (30) days advance written notice of the desire to terminate one or more of their RRA(s).

  • For registrars, this notice can be emailed by the registrar primary contact to registrar@icann.org, using the registrar's official letterhead, and must be signed by an authorized officer of the registrar company. If a terminating registrar has names under management, it may choose to identify a proposed gaining registrar in the RRA termination notice to ICANN org.
  • For registry operators, this notice can be emailed by a credentialed Naming Services portal (NSp) user to globalsupport@icann.org, using the registry's official letterhead, and must be signed by an authorized officer of the registry operator. Registry operators must also provide ICANN org with confirmation that they have given RRA termination notice to the registrar. ICANN org will reach out to the losing registrar to confirm if it wishes to identify a proposed gaining registrar.

Upon termination of an RRA (whether by the registrar or registry operator), any names formerly sponsored by the registrar must be transferred to an ICANN-accredited registrar that has an RRA in effect with the registry operator for the generic top-level domain (gTLD) names to be transferred. ICANN org follows its De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure to ensure the successful transition of the names and the protection of the registrants. ICANN org uses its gaining registrar selection process per the De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure in scenarios where a registrar does not identify a proposed gaining registrar.

If you have further questions you may contact your ICANN account manager or send an email to the below.

For information regarding amendments to an RRA, please refer to the RRA Amendment webpage.

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."