country code top-level domains
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".
A domain name registrar is a company accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and/or by a national ccTLD authority to register Internet domain names. ICANN has authority over gTLDs, or Generic Top Level Domains. Examples of gTLDs include .com, .net and .org.
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.
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