I’m completely dumbfounded.
I searched up a domain name I would like, and it turned out that no one owned it, it was just a ”Can’t reach the site” message. My immediate thought is how can I get this site, it should be free right? Since I’m not actually renting it or buying it from anyone, it’s completely unused.
I google it up and can’t find a single answer, all everyone says is you need to buy a subscription from a company like GoDaddy, Domain.com, One.com and others. These companies don’t own the site I wanted, they must register it in some way before they sell it to me, so why can’t I just register it myself and skip the middle man?
Seriously, are these companies paying google to hide this info?
In: Technology
ICANN is a non-profit organisation that manages things like IP addressing and domain names. Basically, the modern internet & world wide web heavily depend on ICANN as a trustworthy, central, reliable source of truth.
ICANN outsource the management of top level domains (.com, .net, .org etc) to other companies like Verisign. Those companies then outsource the work of selling and registering domain names to companies called domain registrars, like GoDaddy etc.
ICANN has very onerous requirements on who can manage a TLD (the biggest requirement being money), and slightly less strict requirements for who can be a domain registrar (which are still mostly about money). Someone also needs to run the servers than match a domain name to an IP address (DNS servers), which part of your domain registration fee usually covers.
If you have enough money and resources, you can apply to be a domain registrar and run your own DNS servers. You can even manage your own TLD if you time it right (ICANN only opens applications for TLDs at certain times) or manage to take over an existing TLD custodian (FYI Verisign is worth about USD$1.5 billion).
If you want to you can also bypass ICANN entirely, just run your own DNS servers. Use it to register [google.com](http://google.com) if you want, nothing stops you. The trick then is to convince every other internet user – including major ISPs and other corporations – to trust your DNS servers. Lots of companies do this within their local network. If you’ve ever heard of a PiHole, it has this functionality built in.
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