ccTLD
RegistrantMost of the NICs in the world receive an annual fee from a legal user in order for the legal user to utilize the domain name (i.e. a sort of a leasing agreement exists, subject to the registry's terms and conditions). Depending on the various naming convention of the registries, legal users become commonly known as "registrants" or as "domain holders".
The codes EH and KP, although theoretically available as ccTLDs for Western Sahara and North Korea, have never been assigned and do not exist in DNS. Similarly, the code CS (Serbia and Montenegro) is not assigned an operator (cs was previously assigned to Czechoslovakia). TL (post-independence East Timor), is now being introduced to replace TP.
A domain name registry, also called Network Information Centre (NIC), is part of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet which converts domain names to IP addresses. It is an organisation that manages the registration of Domain names within the top-level domains for which it is responsible, controls the policies of domain name allocation, and technically operates its top-level domain.
Domain names are managed under a hierarchy headed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which manages the top of the DNS tree by administrating the data in the root nameservers.
IANA also operates the .int registry for intergovernmental organisations, the .arpa zone for protocol administration purposes, and other critical zones such as root-servers.net.
IANA delegates all other domain name authority to other domain name registries such as VeriSign.
A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country or a dependent territory.
ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs. Creation and delegation of ccTLDs is performed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and with certain exceptions noted below corresponds to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes maintained by the United Nations.
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