Organization like Gandi, accredited by the competent authorities in assigning and managing domain names. This may be, depending on the TLD:

• a trustee authority, generally governmental, dealing with political and judicial matters
• a registry, in charge of managing the centralized database for each TLD, that only registrars can modify.

The role of the registrar mainly consists of selling and managing domain names for the general public. In the naming organization scheme, the registrar is the last technical party that customers can access to purchase a domain name.

The registrar's activity is complementary with that of web hosts, internet service providers, and IP address allocation. All these actors work together to make the internet work.