Transferring an already registered domain involves switching the registrar that handles the registration service, so after the transfer itself, you’ll have to manage things like renewal fees or DNS modifications through the new registrar company. The transfer procedure is standard with most gTLD and ccTLD extensions. Certain country-code extensions are more specific and entail different steps, but in the general case transferring a domain involves a few necessary procedures and one of them is unlocking the domain name. The lock is a safety feature, which is being adopted by more and more registry organizations. It is a default feature supported by all generic Top-Level Domains. If a domain is locked, it won’t be possible to start a transfer process, so nobody can even try to register your domain name. The lock can be removed only through the account where the domain is registered in the first place and all new domains that support this functionality are locked by default the moment they are registered.