If I make a website, like cookie.com, what exactly makes browsers direct to the “cookie.com” page I made? And what stops multiple “cookie.com”s from being hosted from different servers? The internet is decentralized so I just don’t understand how domain registration works at all.
On this note, what do the different domain extensions mean, and how are they created? It used to be 99% .net, .org and .com, but there’s like 50 trillion different ones now.
In: Technology
That would be [ICANN](https://www.icann.org/) – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
It’s not really just them, though. They are kind of the overseers of domain registry as a whole. When domain names are registered, they are checked for availability against the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS servers are all over, there’s not one single place, however they all typically share the same information.
When you type in a web address in your browser, you are asking a DNS server if they know who “cookie.com” is. That DNS server will go “Oh, yeah I know cookie.com! They’re at 64.111.195.214, I’ll connect you over to them.”
Because these DNS servers and domain name registrars all share the same information, you cannot register a domain with a name that is in use.
You could, however, set up your own DNS server with its own associations. You could say that cookie.com’s IP is 142.250.105.113, and then if you set that DNS server as your DNS provider, when you type cookie.com into your browser, you’d end up at google.
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