Registrars are the retail-facing companies you actually buy domains from: Modusdom, GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Porkbun, OVH, and ~2000 others worldwide.
To become a registrar, a company must:
- Pay an ICANN accreditation fee ($4,000 application + $4,000/year)
- Sign the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA)
- Demonstrate technical and financial capability
- Pass periodic audits
Registrars sit between you (the registrant) and the registry that controls the TLD. They handle:
- Registration, renewal, transfer transactions
- Customer support and account management
- Collecting fees + passing the registry fee + ICANN fee upstream
- Enforcing ICANN policies on registrants
- Responding to legal demands (subpoenas, UDRP complaints)
Modusdom is a reseller of Tucows (OpenSRS), which holds the ICANN accreditation directly. This is a common pattern: large accredited registrars like Tucows, Enom, ResellerClub provide white-label registration to thousands of smaller resellers.
From a customer perspective, the reseller relationship is invisible — you interact only with your registrar (us). For technical purposes (transfers, registry communication), Tucows acts on our behalf.
