Managing Mission：Critical Domains and DNS

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Registries and Registrars

So far, you've seen references to registries and registrars. It's important to understand the difference between them, and how you interact with these entities that exercise direct control over your domain names.

Your domain names are subject to, and impacted by, external and internal factors. Internal factors are the operation of the DNS and the management principles you apply to your portfolio. External factors come from registries under which your domains are registered and the oversight bodies that administer them. Those factors manifest on your portfolio via the conduit of the registrars for each given domain.

To effectively manage your portfolio, you must both be cognizant of, and understand, the influence of these external entities.

A domain registry operates a Top-Level Domain (TLD) for a given namespace .COM is a TLD. Your country has its own County Code TLD (a ccTLD), mine is .CA, for Canada. (Each country takes its two-character country code from the ISO 3166 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166 list.)

Different TLDs have different registry operators. Some registry operators run more than one TLD.

A registry can operate under a "fat" model, in which the registry operator provides most or even all of the functionality at both the registry level and the end user Registrant level. In other words, a registry may operate as its own registrar; those who would like to register domains in it would deal directly with the registry itself.

More often, a TLD is operated under what I call a Triple-R model: the registry accredits registrars who then facilitate domain-name-registration services to the end users (The Registrants). Take a look at this diagram:

Figure 2.1: Registrars provide services to registrants by acting as a conduit to the registries.

(Some ccTLDs are hybrid models, operating a direct-to-registrant model from the registry while also allowing third-party Registrars to provide registration services , .TO and .IO come to mind.)

Know your Registries.

There is an official IANA taxonomy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain#Types) for the various types of TLDs. For our purposes, we are going to limit our scope to a few of the myriad TLDs/Registries:

Generic TLDs (gTLDs)
Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs)
The "new" TLDs
Internationalized (IDN) TLDs
Infrastructure TLDs