Transferring an already registered domain involves changing the company that provides the domain registration service, so after the transfer itself, you will have to manage things like renewal fees or DNS modifications through the new domain registrar. The transfer procedure itself is standard with most generic and country-code Top-Level Domain extensions. Some country-code extensions are more specific and entail different steps, but in the general case transferring a domain entails a few necessary procedures and one of them is unlocking the domain name. The lock is a security option, which is being adopted by more and more domain registry operators. It’s a standard feature supported by all generic Top-Level Domains. If a domain is locked, it won’t be possible to initiate a transfer procedure, so nobody can even attempt to snatch your domain. The domain lock can be annulled only through the account where the domain name is registered in the first place and all new domains that support this functionality are locked by default when they are registered.