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EPP – Registry-Registrar Protocol

In order to facilitate the administration of the domains within each Registrar's responsibility, the .PT uses the Registry-Registrar system, in accordance with the EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) specifications.

Registration of a domain on the Internet typically involves three entities:

  • a customer who wants to register a domain name and who will be its registrant;

  • a Registrar (company or entity that supplies the name registration service to the customer);

  • a Registry that supplies services to the Registrar, serving as an official repository of all the necessary functional information (registrations) for resolving domain names (DNS.PT Association, .PT).

The EPP Protocol is a service for normalising communication between the .PT domain Registrars and the DNS.PT Association, .PT (which is the Registry of this top-level domain) whose objective is to make the entire domain registration and maintenance procedure by these entities automatic.

A normalised communication protocol will enable a Registrar to develop its own graphic interface, while at the same time being able to communicate directly with the .PT domain registration system. In other words, it enables operations in that interface to be carried out in real-time.

.PT chose to adopt the EPP Protocol [RFC4930], which is a protocol that is defined through XML and contains commands for session control, search and content change.