Who owns the domains?

[Sasa]

Joseph S D Yao <jsdy at center.osis.gov> wrote in message news:<bnbupk$1d6k$1 at sf1.isc.org>...
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 02:08:47AM -0700, Sasa wrote:
> > I have just registered a domain for 35$/2yrs and my question is, to
> > whom goes the money (excluding the registrar)? I pay for a virtual
> > domain, which is 30 bytes on a Whois server and i don't know who gets
> > the money. Who decides if a domain is reserved or not, who has the
> > right to sell one?
> > Everything around this is very unclear and i can't get an answer
> > anywhere.
> 
> RFC 1591: "The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the
> overall authority for the IP Addresses, the Domain Names, and many
> other parameters, used in the Internet."
> 
> See <URL: http://www.iana.org/domain-names.htm>.
> 
> If all the WHOIS servers in the world went away, the domain name system
> would remain intact.  DNS and the WHOIS servers have NOTHING NOTHING
> NOTHING to do with each other, except that the information should be
> consistent.  This is why they are often maintained by the same people.
> But even when they do, for whatever reason, become inconsistent, DNS
> gets its information from the name servers.
> 
> The piddly amount that you are paying is for the company whom you are
> paying to correctly file your domain information with the registry
> [along with the fee that the registry charges], and to pay the many
> people whose job it is to keep DNS working properly on a day-to-day
> basis.  Some pennies probably get back to the IANA or other orgs that
> help maintain the public Internet, since nobody owns the Internet.
> 
> [From your question, I assume that you are paying a registrar directly,
> rather than paying an ISP to pay a registrar to ...]
> 
> The top-level domain (TLD) registries decide who gets to be a
> registrar, per IANA guidelines.  For .com and .net, e.g., please see
> <URL: http://www.verisign.com/nds/naming/registrar/custalph.html>.
> 
> A domain is reserved if somebody has already paid for it.  With very
> few exceptions, any unused domains are available.  What exceptions
> there might be are probably described in one of the RFCs [Requests For
> Comments] that are the standards for the Internets.
> 
> See <URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html>.

   There are two DIFFERENT steps that are needed to bring a site on
line (with a name). The second is the DNS registration, I don't argue
with this, I know someone has to mantain the DNSs. The first is the
domain registration, and I wonder: who has to mantain a domain which
is something virtual that doesn't need to be mantained?

   I pay for DNSs because they offer me a service (they transform my
IP to a string), I can make my own DNS if I wanted.

   But the word public (internet) sounds strange when talking about
domains ( NOT domain names), since I have to pay to someone, I don't
know even who (the registrars buy the domains from Mr. X and resell
them to the public) for a service that doesn't exist.

 This can mean only one thing, that someone owns internet, who?

I own the mountain A230 on Jupiter, wanna buy it?