Becoming a registrar, while straightforward, is not trivial. There are a number of legal, technical, and financial requirements that must be met prior to becoming a registrar.

For .COM, .NET, .ORG, .BIZ, .INFO, .NAME, .COOP, .AERO, and .MUSEUM you need ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) accreditation, and then technical certification from the registry operators. For other Top-Level Domains (TLDs) you need accreditation from the individual registry operators. We focus on ICANN accreditation and registry certification in this description of the process. Becoming a registrar in other TLDs is similar.

The process of becoming an accredited registrar involves a number of steps:

• Apply for Accreditation
  First, your organization must complete an ICANN Registrar Accreditation Application and send it to ICANN along with a non-refundable application fee (US$2,500 at the time of this writing). The application also includes your reviewing the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), a legal document that governs the behavior of ICANN-accredited registrars. You will have to sign that document if you qualify for accreditation.

  The application comprises a series of questions regarding your company, business capabilities, technical capabilities, customer support capabilities, financial health, and so on.

  Archetopia is able to assist in the completion of the technology-related portions of the application as part of your company's acquisition of our turnkey RIPE product.

  ICANN reviews the application and may make follow-up inquiries.

   

• Receive Notification
  After completing its review of your application ICANN will notify you that you either qualify for accreditation or you don't. If you do, you will then have to sign the RAA in duplicate and send the orginals to ICANN. It is at this time that you identify the registries in which you want to operate. Many registrars only operate in .COM, .NET, and .ORG, while others also operate in, for example, .INFO and .BIZ, and still others choose to operate in all of the ICANN-related registries. ICANN notifies the registries that you've selected that you're accredited so that you may proceed with certification.

  A few weeks after you've sent the signed RAA to ICANN they will return a countersigned copy to you along with an invoice for the annual fixed portion of the accreditation fee for the first TLD, (US$4,000 at the time of this writing) plus the fee (US$500.00 at the time of this writing) for each additional TLD.

  Now you must finalize the contents of the Agreement that each of your customers accepts, as well as the language for your Uniform Domainname Dispute Policy (UDRP), both of which will have received considerable scrutiny during ICANN's review of your application.

   

• Get Certified
  Now that you're accredited you must pass the technical certification tests for each registry in which you will be operating. If you're operating in .COM, .NET, .ORG, .BIZ, and .INFO, that's four different registries (.COM and .NET are both operated by Verisign, .ORG is Public Interest Registry, .BIZ is Neulevel, and .INFO is Afilias).

  As you may expect, each registry has its own set of technical requirements and their own way of testing them; there is no single registry certification test. In fact, the back-ends used by the various registries are not even identical, and in some cases the protocols for interacting with the automated registry systems are completely different from one another.

  Each registry has designed their test to verify complete function of your back-end software with their automated registry systems. The tests include simple operations like domain registrations and renewals, as well as more complex operations like creating nameservers and transferring domains from one registrar to another and communications efficiency tests.

  As part of your acquisition of your RIPE system we take care of the certification process for you by running the certification tests with the registries using the actual server hardware and software that you receive as your turnkey registrar solution.

   

• Go Live!
  Once certified, you place funds on deposit with each of the registries to cover your anticipated monthly activity.

  Congratulations! You may now start operating as an ICANN-accredited registrar!