Who owns all domains?

Question

I know some sites like GoDaddy and such sell domains. Where do they get these domains from? Is there somebody who sold all the domains originally. The internet is free and isn't owned by anybody. how is this possible? How do people run there own DNS servers?

Solution

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It's a consortium (non-profit corporation) that manages the assignment of domain names and IP address ranges on behalf of the community.

In principle, if ICANN stops being useful people could recognize different top-level domains. In practice no one wants to do that.

Comments

[Resorath]

This is a really obvious wikipedia question. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System

[Freesnöw]

Is there a specific piece of that you would like to show me or are you just throwing a large wiki article at me? Could you point me to something instead of pointing out your obvious knowledge. Just because you know something doesn't mean everybody else does.

[jcrawfordor]

I think this is a question that should be answered by independent research, but I don't agree with the justification for closure... how is this subjective and argumentative? the asker is looking for a summary of how the DNS system is organized, control-wise. ICANN/IANA run the root systems and delegate to registrars for control, the root systems delegate to zone DNS servers. This is not at all controversial, it's how the system works.

[jcrawfordor]

Also, I don't think that the simple Wikipedia article really clears this up - we all love Wikipedia, but it has the tendency to be in-depth to a fault. That article has so much information in it the info the asker is looking for is hard to find and hard to understand.

[David Yates]

here's the answer I was about to submit when @studiohack closed the question: "What domain registrars sell you is the opportunity to register a domain with the rest of the world: it may or may not previously exist (eg, you might buy "somewebsite.org" from the previous registrant), but you don't really "own" the domain - you own the rights to use it."