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
You’re paying someone to provide domain name lookup services, sending traffic to that domain along to the proper IP address.
If you want to manage your own domain name system you just need to pay ICANN $185,000 application fee as well as a $6,250 fee per quarter to maintain ownership of your domain name system. Otherwise you need to pay a registrar to rent a domain name temporarily, like nearly every other website on the internet.
If anyone could register any name they wanted, people would try to use the same ones as others. We set up a global service that allows us all to agree on who owns what domain. We need to trust those allowed to add to that system, which means verification and fees. You can certainly become your own registrar, and register names on your own behalf, but it is very expensive if you’re not planning on registering thousands of domains.
Edit: Forgot to mention, you can use any domain you’d like, but since you’re the only one who agrees you own it, it will only work on your local network. If you set up your own domain lookup service that other people agree to use, they can see those domains too. This type of thing is often used for domain hijacking attacks. You get the victim to use your nameservers, then when they go to their bank website, they’re really going to the one you set up to look like their bank.
Computers don’t communicate in plaintext like we humans do. In a rudimentary internet connection, domain names don’t exist; instead you have to visit websites by their IP address.
Of course, that’s incredibly tedious; humans can’t remember a hundred different numbers the way they can remember 100 different words, so instead we use domain name servers (DNS), which are specialized computers that link a domain (google.com) to an IP (74.125.239.35). When you enter a domain in your URL, the packet is first sent to a DNS, which then maps the domain you entered to its valid IP before sending it off to that destination.
When you pay for a domain name, you’re not necessarily paying for the rights to that name, you’re paying whoever your leasing from to host your domain in their DNS.
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.
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.
Domain names are hierarchical. There are top level domain registrars that handle each allowable suffix. If you want a xxxx.com name you have to pay money to register with the registrar that handles .com names.
There is no mechanism for the average person to just make up a top level domain and therefore register their own sites
Register it with….who?
The ones you’re paying are the ones who “register” domain names, in that they run the servers everyone else’s computers go to to find out what IP address goes with that domain name.
The top level domains (.com, .us, .co.uk, .pt, etc) all have owners already. So if you want to register “zuperlucaz.com” you have to pay the “owner” of the .com top level domain (oversimplification warning).
Nothing prevents you from “registering” just “zuperlucaz” as a top level domain, but as others have said you’d need to somehow have all the DNS servers in the world to properly resolve your domain and for that to happen you’d need to get [icann](https://www.icann.org/)’s approval (spoiler: you can’t because you’re not a country).
You aren’t really paying for the domain. You are paying for representation of a domain name in a coherent global system. You are always paying for that service, that’s why it is never free.
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