Why can’t one register a domain name themselves, instead of paying a company to do it?

572 viewsOtherTechnology

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

17 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You can absolutly do that yourself. It’s called becoming a domain registrar. But that is very expensive (~20k$ in fees for the first year alone) and a lot of work (running multiple services distributed over the whole globe and related infrastructur) to do. Those sites you found offer you a service of not having to do that.

How to become a registrar is a bit too complicated for ELI5 but you can read up here: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/accreditation-2012-02-25-en

Since it’s neither cheap or easy to do that, even most large companies pay a middle man to do it.

You are viewing 1 out of 17 answers, click here to view all answers.