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Cross-Ownership Notification Service

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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.

As indicated in Section 2.9 (b) of the base Registry Agreement, registry operators who enter into an affiliate or reseller relationship with an ICANN-accredited registrar, or who subcontract the provision of any Registry Services (as defined in the base Registry Agreement) to an ICANN-accredited registrar, must provide ICANN org with prompt notice of the contract, transaction, or other arrangement that resulted in affiliation, reseller relationship, or subcontract.

This notice should be provided via the submission of a Cross-Ownership Notification service request in the Naming Services portal. In addition to the notice of the establishment of a cross-ownership relationship, registry operators may also use the Cross-Ownership Notification service to inform ICANN org of changes to or the dissolution of a previously disclosed cross-ownership relationship.

There are three (3) primary steps in the Cross-Ownership Notification service:

  1. Submit a "Cross-Ownership Notification" Request in the Naming Services portal: follow the steps to (a) confirm the type of request - a new relationship or an update to a previously disclosed relationship - and (b) provide relevant details about the entity or entities and relationship(s), such as:

    1. The full legal name and IANA ID of the registrar and/or the full legal name of the registrar reseller that the registry operator has cross-ownership interests in.
    2. The date of the agreement that established cross-ownership between the registry operator and the entity.
    3. The registry operator's percentage of ownership interest in the entity.
  2. ICANN Review: ICANN org performs a detailed review and determines if significant competition issues need to be raised with the registry operator, where applicable.
  3. Administrative Tasks: ICANN org updates its system and records to reflect the information provided.

Questions about this service can be addressed by opening a General Inquiry case in the Naming Services portal or by emailing globalsupport@icann.org.

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

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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."