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
There aren’t a lot of “ELI5” explanations here, so I’m going to offer one.
It’s like building a stick fort in the woods and wanting everybody to come and see it. If anybody wants to see it, they need to know where it is. You could try to make a map yourself, but how are you going to get everybody to see that map? Instead, you go to the company who makes the maps that everybody already uses, and pay them to put your stick fort on their map.
To take this a little further, you can even make a publicly visible website without a domain (I think?) by making a web server. This is similar to how anybody can come to your stick fort, even if they don’t have a map. Where this analogy breaks down though is that I said “you could try to make your own map” but I don’t know if you can make a domain on your own computer that goes to some IP like you can make your own local web server.
On second thought, this analogy is almost closer to a certificate authority.
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