Transferring an active domain involves switching the company that handles the registration service, so after the transfer, you will have to manage things like renewal fees or DNS record updates through the new company. The transfer procedure is standard with most TLD extensions. Certain country-code extensions are more specific and involve different procedures, but in the general case transferring a domain involves several necessary procedures and one of them is unlocking the domain name. The lock is a security feature, which is being embraced by more and more domain name registry organizations. It’s a default feature supported by all generic Top-Level Domains. If a domain is locked, it will not be possible to start a transfer process, so nobody can even try to take your domain. The lock can be removed only through the account where the domain name is registered and all new domains that support this feature are locked by default when they are registered.