Afilias to Offer Registry Lock for 28 Domain Extensions

Afilias has announced that they’ll start offering a “registry lock” service for all 28 owned or operated TLDs on the Afilias registry system.

“Registry Lock” is a service that appeals primarily to bigger brands, governments, high profile websites or financial institutions. With a registry lock applied it makes it incredibly difficult for a domain to be hijacked, its DNS changed or any number of other modifications made without rigorous checks. Unlike the much more common “registrar lock” a “registry lock” is not 100% automated and requires human interaction, checks and sign off before changes are made. In other words it’s very secure, though probably more cumbersome than most domain registrants would like.

Afilias will start offering the registry lock service on all domain extensions from this week.

When a domain is registry locked its EPP status will change to:

serverDeleteProhibited
serverTransferProhibited
serverUpdateProhibited

So for example:

whois afilias.info
Domain Name: AFILIAS.INFO
Registry Domain ID: D217-LRMS
Registrar WHOIS Server:
Registrar URL:
Updated Date: 2019-03-08T14:40:22Z
Creation Date: 2001-07-25T14:11:20Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-07-25T14:11:20Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date:
Registrar: Afilias
Registrar IANA ID: 700023
Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone:
Reseller:
Domain Status: serverDeleteProhibited https://icann.org/epp#serverDeleteProhibited
Domain Status: serverTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#serverTransferProhibited
Domain Status: serverUpdateProhibited https://icann.org/epp#serverUpdateProhibited
Registrant Organization: Afilias
Registrant State/Province:
Registrant Country: IE
Name Server: A0.DIG.AFILIAS-NST.INFO
Name Server: B0.DIG.AFILIAS-NST.INFO
Name Server: C0.DIG.AFILIAS-NST.INFO
Name Server: D0.DIG.AFILIAS-NST.INFO
DNSSEC: signedDelegation

There has been some discussion in recent months about a degree of “level setting” with regard to registry lock. Essentially at the moment both ccTLD and gTLD registry operators can offer “a service” to clients and call it a “registry lock”, but there’s a lot of differences between how they all work. It is unlikely that this will change soon, though it is being actively discussed in some fora.

Pricing for registry lock will vary between registrars and not all of them offer it as a service.