Who is the owner of all the .com domain names? When I’m paying for one, what does the company actually do in order to generate it for me? It’s not like they’ve already have it and they’ll just hand it over to me. It never existed in the first place.
In: Technology
Verisign is the company that maintains the .com and .net registries. Warren Buffett has a big stake in that because legal monopolies are usually pretty profitable.
You are paying for a public Domain Naming Service to redirect people to the webpage associated with that name.
Imagine if the table of contents in an encyclopedia had no words, just numbers.
You and everyone else paid to have words put there.
It’s the equivilant of paying to be listed in the Yellow Pages, if you are old enough to be familiar with that.
All computers and other devices on a network get an IP address that is like a phone number and the internet is one giant network. If you want to communicate with a computer, you can use it’s IP address. You can even put the IP address directly into your web browser and it will work if the device has a webpage setup to answer anything that tries to “call” it. Think of that website as an answering machine.
When you say, type in the address for reddit in your browser, what you are really doing is consutling a directory to find out what IP address reddit has it’s stuff parked out. Theres another big computer somewhere that holds all the stuff for reddit (and possibly other websites, but reddit is big enough to have its own) called a server and you are actually contacting that computer and asking it to hook you up with it’s answering machine. It spits out the website you are using now and sends it to your computer.
So when you buy a .com (or any other domain) you are paying for the right to use that address to name whatever IP your website used and that domain name is listed as belonging to that IP in every address book online.
So, ip = phone number, domain name = name of the person using that phone number. Your web browser automatically looks up and dials the number for you and the other computer says hello by sending you a web page.
Websites are just files on a computer somewhere. That computer has an address, just like your house. But people would rather use a word in the browser to go directly to the site, not the series of numbers which is the address of the computer. And so when someone types in the name, a computer out in the internet needs to convert the word into an address of the specific computer the relevant files are stored in. Someone needs to keep that list and allow for changes, otherwise there would be difficulties reaching the site you want. But people all over the world need the list to be available, so there are computers out there that have all the address information. And they need to be all the same, that way you know what to expect when you use a specific name, no matter where you are. And this is a complicated thing, so smart people have to make sure it always works. And they also have to make sure that if someone wants a name to correspond to their computer and no one else’s computer, someone needs to make sure that there are no names used twice. And there are so many people wanting an internet lookup name for their website that it is an important job with lots of work to do, and someone has to pay those people. And if these names were free, big businesses would buy up all the possible names, and you couldn’t get any names because they are all gone. Some companies figured out how to get a name registered on the list, so they help others do it, but they need to be able to buy food, so they have to be paid.
These are great answers. But, how could people start selling them? Like how did the founder of GoDaddy just start selling them?
reddits server isnt actually called reddit. its called something like 151.101.65.140 or whatever (not exectly sure what reddits true name is).
So each time you want to go to reddit, you have to type in those numbers. Same goes for every other website.
But thats too hard. So what you are doing is typing in old.reddit.com and your browser knows the difference. Your browser knows that you are not directly looking about the Server IP (the numbers), but a “nickname” of the server. Your browser knows where you can find the true name of the server. Its in a list.
So your broweser checks the list about old.reddit.com and finds out the true name is 151.101.65.140 (or whatever) and starts to contact this IP.
You are paying for whoever has the List. To maintain this list is expensive.
the legality of it is fussy – ICANN could be said to be the group which owns all the domains of that type – as well as any others.
https://www.icann.org/registrar-reports/accredited-list.html
above is a list of “registrars” who ICANN trusts to register domains safely and properly for reasonable users. The fact that child porn domains aren’t common to the point where neither me nor you have ever seen one could be largely accredited to them. maybe. who knows.
some companies, like alphabet inc, will directly register a domain from ICANN. because they can.
anyway, icann’s standard is what almost all public DNS’ use as the standard.
All we be explained when you read the book,
DNS and BIND.
That book has saved my life.
Can’t sleep?
Try it
.
You aren’t buying the domain *from* them. That would imply that they own it, or are in possession of it before.
You are paying to register it, so that they can maintain a public record that *you* own it.
They in turn are licensed to register it at a central registry. And part of their license requires that they will not allow someone else to register a domain that is already in that registry. The fee you pay is a fee for their service, because they are managing that registration on your behalf (there are actually quite a few pieces involved).
It’s similar to a copyright or patent registry. No one owns that copyright or patent before you do. But you have to pay a fee to register your idea, so it goes on record (and is maintained and recognized) that you now own it.
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