It’s one of the things I still just can’t get my head around:
Why do you need to yearly pay a company to have them register your domain name? Why couldn’t you do it yourself, like all the other things you do to build a website?
In: 6
Short and simplified answer is because domains are pretty much the only part of internet that’s centralized, there is an organization called ICANN that maintains them, and while you can have your own DNS server (like telephone book for domains), it generally either copies things from other places or refers to them, and what domain is for what ip is dictated in a centralized way.
Technically, there might be some ways to do domains that don’t rely on this, but the system we use (or is most popular,) works like that, and while you can use those less popular ways, most other people won’t use them and so they can’t access your place.
That’s why you need to pay to have things registered, you can also technically pay to make your own domain suffix, but it would cost much more.
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