Domain Trustee Service: Register restricted ccTLDs

Expanding into a new market usually means registering the local ccTLD. Then you read the registry’s policy and find it only accepts registrants with a local address, or a company registered in the country. A Trustee Service is the standard way around that, and it has been for years.

This guide explains what a Trustee Service is and how it works. We will also answer the question: if the trustee’s details sit in the registration record, who owns the domain?

What a domain Trustee Service is

A domain Trustee Service is a local intermediary that satisfies a registry’s local presence requirement, so you can register a country-code domain you would otherwise be ineligible for. The trustee supplies the local address or legal entity the registry insists on. You remain the party that controls and benefits from the domain.

Two confusions are worth clearing up first, because both are common. A domain trustee has nothing to do with the financial or estate-planning kind of trustee. That trustee manages assets for a beneficiary under a trust. A domain trustee exists for one purpose, which is to meet a registry’s eligibility rules.

Nor is it WHOIS privacy. A privacy service hides your contact details in public lookups but does nothing to make you eligible. If a registry requires a local presence, privacy leaves you locked out. The two are not alternatives: one conceals data you are already entitled to hold, the other supplies data you are missing.

Why registries require a local presence

A local presence requirement is a registry policy that ties a ccTLD to its country by demanding that the registrant have some form of local connection. Registries impose these rules deliberately: to keep registrants legally reachable inside the national jurisdiction, to keep domains within reach of tax and consumer-protection law, and to protect the meaning of the national namespace. A .br or a .it is supposed to signal a real connection to that country.

A Trustee Service has an annual fee, charged per domain, on top of the domain’s own registration or renewal fee. You pay for the domain, and you pay separately to keep it eligible. The fee varies by extension because the local obligation varies. Where the trustee provides an address, the cost is modest. Where the local role carries more legal weight, it rises.

One point trips up enterprise teams regularly. ICANN accreditation does not govern ccTLD eligibility. ICANN’s policy framework applies to generic TLDs. Country-code TLDs are run by national registry operators who set their own rules independently, so your registrar being ICANN-accredited says nothing about whether you can register a given ccTLD. The registry’s own published policy is the only source of truth.

What registries ask for varies, and the type of requirement decides whether a Trustee Service is enough. There are three bands:

1. No local requirement. Anyone can register. Most gTLDs and many open ccTLDs.
2. Local address or authorised contact. A trustee or local agent satisfies the rule.
3. Registered in-country legal entity. Only a real local company qualifies, sometimes with a local tax or business identifier. A trustee providing an address is not enough.

Who owns a domain with a Trustee Service

With a proper trustee agreement in place, you are the beneficial owner of the domain. The trustee’s name may be the one the registry sees, but the trustee holds it for you. Economic and legal ownership sits with you throughout. All of which rests on the agreement. So it’s worth reading it.

There are usually two models. Either the trustee goes in as the registrant of record, with their name in the registrant field, or the trustee is only an administrative or authorised local contact and you stay the registrant. You’d always prefer the second. Plenty of registries won’t allow it, because their policy says the registrant itself has to be local.

What the public record shows. Between GDPR and general data minimisation, WHOIS and RDAP give up much less than they used to. There you could read the trustee’s local details sitting in the registrant or contact field. The trustee agreement itself is nowhere in those records. It’s a private contract.

The agreement should contain these three clauses. With those three in place, the trustee is a name in a record field and nothing else.

• the trustee transfers or releases the domain on your instruction, unconditionally;
• the trustee may not use, sell, encumber or assert any claim over the domain;
• the trustee forwards any legal or official correspondence it receives to you, within a defined timeframe.

Which ccTLDs require a Trustee Service

Here’s list of the ccTLDs requiring a local address. These policies might get revised, so check the registry’s current requirement. And make sure whether a trustee solves your problem.

The .de case: a requirement that surfaces later, not at registration

We get asked this one a lot, usually by clients outside Europe: do you need a trustee or a German address, to register a .de domain? No. And because we’re a German registrar and a DENIC member, we can be specific about what the rule actually says.

DENIC used to require an administrative contact, the Admin-C, who had to be reachable in Germany. That role was abolished in 2018 as a consequence of the GDPR, and the authorised-recipient mechanism replaced the function it had served for foreign holders. The mechanism has been tested in court. In January 2025 the Landgericht Düsseldorf (Az. 38 O 162/24) confirmed that serving a claim on a recipient named under § 3 (4) validly reaches a domain holder based abroad.

This model sits closer to the local-contact model than to trustee-as-registrant. You remain the registrant and owner of your .de domain, and you are satisfying a reachability rule.

Renew your domain and your Trustee Service

The Trustee service is tied to the domain’s ongoing eligibility. In most cases it renews alongside the domain. If it expires, the domain can fall out of eligibility and the registry may suspend or delete it. An expired trustee arrangement can take a domain out of compliance without any visible warning, and with it your website, your email and any certificates.

Transfers, disputes and legal notices

A domain with a Trustee Service behaves like any domain in your portfolio. There are three situations when it requires more attention.

Transfers. You can move a domain with a Trustee Service to another registrar but the trustee arrangement has to either come along or be set up again at the other end. Ask the receiving registrar whether they cover that TLD before you request the AuthCode. A transfer can go through perfectly and still leave the domain ineligible the moment it lands, which is the kind of thing you discover weeks later.

Disputes. If someone files a UDRP or an ADR complaint, the respondent that matters is the beneficial owner, not the name in the registrant field. Your trustee agreement needs to say so explicitly, otherwise you get the awkward situation where a decision technically binds a trustee who has no stake in the outcome. Charlotte Spencer from WIPO walked us through how these cases actually run in an interview, and it’s worth ten minutes.

Legal notices. These go to the trustee, or to the authorised recipient, because that’s what the local role exists for. What you have to nail down in the contract is how fast they forward them to you, with an actual number of days in the text rather than “promptly”.

How to choose a provider of a Trustee Service

When looking at the product page, most providers will probably look the same. Here’s what to actually compare:

• The written agreement. It must establish you as beneficial owner, grant unconditional transfer or release rights, bar the trustee from using the domain, and require prompt forwarding of legal notices.
• Breadth of covered TLDs. A provider covering only a handful of extensions forces you to fragment your domain portflio across vendors.
• Transparent per-TLD pricing. You should see the fee per extension right away, not discover it at checkout.
• Handling of legal notices. Ask how they are forwarded and how quickly.
• A documented exit process. The provider should make leaving straightforward rather than obstruct it.
• Automation. Provisioning and renewing Trustee Services by hand across dozens of restricted TLDs does not scale. Make sure an automated renewal will be in place.

Trustee Service or local legal entity?

Most of the time this isn’t really a choice, because the registry has made it for you. Where you do have a decision is the middle ground: the registry would accept a local contact, and you’re wondering whether to set up a company anyway.

Go with the trustee if the domain is one of several defensive domain registrations, or if the launch date is in six weeks and incorporation takes longer than that. Set up the entity if you’re actually going to trade there. You’ll need it for other things anyway, and at that point running a trustee alongside a company you already own is just an extra fee to cancel by the next cycle.

Register ccTLDs with the Trustee Service

The markets where a brand is least protected tend to be the restricted ones, for the simple reason that registering there looks like more work than it is. InterNetX has one of the largest TLD portfolios, including ccTLDs from every region, and the Trustee Service covers the ones that would otherwise need a company on the ground.

Register ccTLDs in AutoDNS

Frequently asked questions