Who owns the domains?

[Joseph S D Yao]

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>.

-- 
Joe Yao				jsdy at center.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
OSIS Center Systems Support					EMT-B
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