How do internet domains work? Who are you paying?
In: 5478
My team built the domain registrar at Squarespace (I’m no longer there.) There are two business entities involved in buying a domain.
The first is the “registrar”. These are companies like Godaddy. Registrars are the Expedia of domains. Their job is to handle all of the retail transactions with customers, collect payments, and reserve domains on behalf of their customers. Registrars don’t own any domains themselves, rather, they connect to domain wholesalers and broker the sale, and do support along the way. For this, they take a fee.
Since registrars don’t actually own any domains, who does? These are called (confusingly) “registries.” One registry owns all .com domains. Another owns all .net. Another owns .dev. And so on. Registries are domain wholesalers, and they only sell to customers via registrars. Registries keep track of registrations, renewals, DNS, and other technical and administrative tasks for their domain. They also take a fee.
There is an organization (not a government organization, just a private entity) called ICANN. They also take a fee. You can apply to become “accredited” by them to sell domains. This means agreeing to an aide by certain rules, both technical and administrative, to sell domains. Accredited registries will only work with accredited registrars. ICANN generally wants customers to have a uniform experience buying domains, so by buying accredited domains, you can be pretty confident that your domain will work as advertised.
Latest Answers