What is a Registrar?
An organization or company authorized by its respective government or by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to provide domain name registration services. A registrar must be authorized by the registry to act as an agent of the registry to process domain name registrations, where the agent is not a reseller.
A registrar is responsible for maintaining the register of a company’s shareholders. This records the names and addresses of all ordinary shareholders and the number of shares that each shareholder owns. The register is maintained by Capita Registrars (‘the registrar’). The registrar updates the register when a shareholder’s personal circumstances or shareholding change, and also send out dividend cheques and share certificates.
Defining a registrar requires a quick jaunt through the history books: Domain names are shortcuts to help make navigating the Internet easier for humans. At the end of the day, every single domain name maps to a numeric IP address. This practice is known as Domain Name Service, or DNS. The giant database of who is on first, sometimes called the root, is maintained by a company named Network Solutions. When the Internet was privatized in the early 1990s, Network Solutions was charged with maintaining the database, adding new domains and updating existing ones. They were also allowed to bill customers an annual fee for the service. Since then The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the orginization set up to worry about these things, have allowed other private companies to collect registration fees. Network Solutions continues to maintain the root DNS servers because someone has to act as the final authority and they’ve been at it for a while. So, a registrar is
