You can usually transfer it to another user on the same registrar. They just don't want to lose it to another company. (At least, that's my super rough understanding of it.)

You should match people that have submitted domains from the same registrar so fees are avoided in most cases.

That sounds like a wonderful idea... but far too much work for it to be worth it. Maybe next year...

Oh it's simple really.

  $conn = fsockopen ('whois.verisign-grs.com', 43, $errno, $errstr, 1);
  fputs($conn, $domain."\r\n");
  while(!feof($conn)) 
	$output .= fgets($conn,128);
  $registrar = reset(explode("\n",end(explode('Registrar:',$output))));

Awesome! Thanks for this. I'll play with it over the weekend. Still working on the specifics.

You could make the source available and let some of us help contribute to make this possible.