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 is a tremendous amount of network and server infrastructure around the world that makes domains names work. You are chipping in money to help maintain that.
My first domain I registered with [InterNIC](https://www.internic.net/) when they were the only ones managing them. The demand outgrew the organization and they farmed it to [registrars](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/what-2013-05-03-en) who have to follow [ICANN](https://www.icann.org/en/beginners)’s rules. Registrars are accredited, which is why you can’t do it yourself, unless you go through the accreditation process.
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.
OP there are a ton of incorrect answers conflating domain name registration with DNS services.
As an old geek who was witness to the birth of ICANN and registered names with NSI back in the day, all these half right/half fantasy responses hurt my head.
OP, the consensus answers here are right enough for your purposes. But.. wow. People do not understand the internet.
Can you just scribble a desired number on the back of your car, rather than go through someone who keeps track of that, makes sure it’s yours to use, that you have insurance to operate it, not duplicated, etc? Similar thing.
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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