Transferring an active domain involves changing the company that provides the domain name registration service, so after the transfer, you will have to manage things like renewal fees or DNS resource record modifications through the new registrar company. The transfer process itself is standard with most universal and country-specific Top-Level Domain extensions. Some country-code extensions are more specific and entail different procedures, but in the general case transferring a domain entails a few basic steps and one of them is unlocking the domain. The lock is a security feature, which is being embraced by more and more domain registry operators. It is a standard feature supported by all generic top-level domain names. If a domain is locked, it will not be possible to initiate a transfer procedure, so nobody can even attempt to take your domain name. 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 the moment they are registered.