Transferring an existing domain entails switching the registrar company that handles the registration service, so after the transfer, you will have to manage things like renewal payments or DNS resource record updates through the new registrar company. The transfer procedure is standard with most generic and country-code top-level domain name extensions. Some country-code extensions are more specific and entail different steps, but in the general case transferring a domain name involves several necessary steps and one of them is unlocking the domain name. The lock is a safety option, which is being adopted by more and more domain registry operators. It is a standard feature supported by all generic TLDs. If a domain name is locked, it will not be possible to start a transfer process, so nobody can even attempt to take your domain. The lock can be removed only through the account where the domain name is registered in the first place and all new domain names that support this feature are locked by default the moment they are registered.