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
What you’re paying for is a Top Level Domain provider. When you purchase a domain name, typically that is all you get, just the name associated to your company/person etc. But just owning a domain name doesn’t make it usable. For a domain to be useful, other people have to know what IP addresses are associated with it because domain name to IP translation is not just a magic process. When you type in google.com in your browser, your computer first does a domain name system lookup (a DND lookup) to determine what IP address it should use to contact the google servers. Typically your computer will use your ISPs DNS servers, but those servers can hold every possible domain name, so what they actually do is have a list of other DNS servers to contact to find out the names it doesn’t know. For instance the Comcast DNS servers don’t know anything about GoDaddy domains, so it forwards the requests to GoDaddy servers as well as a bunch of other domain registration services to see which one has the info you’re looking for.
What you’re paying for is for GoDaddy to populate and maintain your information for your registered domain. If you were to attempt to register a domain name from the “source” you would still need a DNS server to tell the world where to find the content associated with your domain name. You could of course host your own, but as a single entity no one else would know about it. You could of course attempt to contact companies to let them know, but they would refuse to accept your domain services as you aren’t a verified and reputable organization.
So you in essence are required to go through someone like GoDaddy otherwise your domains would always come up non existent when people try to connect. Not sure if that was ELI5 enough but that’s how it all works.
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