Software Development:
Individual Programming

Solution

The registrar is the organization that administers a top-level domain and rents domain names below the top-level domain to domain owners. A top-level domain is e.g. a country domain such as .us, .mx, .ca or a generic domain such as .com, .net and .org. Some registrars manage several top-level domains, but most registrars only manage a single top-level domain. For example, a different organization is responsible for the administration of a .com domain than for the administration of a .ca domain. On every domain details page, Bitpalace shows you, among other things, the register that manages the top-level domain and in which countries the registrar stores personal data of domain owners.

Registrars define the registration and usage conditions for domain names that are offered under the top-level domain they manage. They also decide whether certain domain names can be used at all. Some registrars differentiate, for example, between common freely available domains and "premium" domains, for which sometimes very high rental prices are charged.

Domain owners cannot rent domains directly from registrars. They rent the domains under the conditions that registrars set for the assignment of domains, but only through the mediation of one or more intermediaries, e.g. the provider with whom the domain owner operates his web space and a wholesaler for domain names. Providers and intermediaries manage domain names for their customers according to the specifications set by the registrar.

Ultimately, therefore, the registrar alone determines what happens to a domain name. With many international country domains, this can harbor major economic risks. New laws or regulations in other countries could, for example, mean that foreign domain owners cannot continue the registration of a foreign country domain or can only continue it under unacceptable conditions. Many registrars are also not fair trade cooperatives like the German Denic, but profit-oriented companies. In the past, such companies have often increased the rental prices of their domains disproportionately drastically because they know that tenants of domains are often forced to keep domains that have already been used, e.g. in order not to lose search engine ranks.

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