Three groups:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit in charge of domain names.

Domain sponsors, the organization that agrees to provide the infrastructure for a particular top level domain. For example, .com is sponsored by Verisign.

The registrar you deal with has a license from the sponsor to sell registrations for a top level domain.

You pay the registrar, the registrar pays the sponsor, and the sponsor pays ICANN.

But why is it so expensive? Like 20$ for a .org Domain. Fuck that.

$20 is dirt cheap lol. They go up to the hundreds or even thousands. But those domains I do wonder why they cost so much, like a .xxx domain

It’s really not dirt cheap, it’s pure madness.

I pay ~$100 for the hosting of 100gb, where I can place 20 websites and use 25 email addresses (which have unlimited space I believe). I can also use licensed stuff like divi theme or install Nextcloud and some other apps. That hosting is secure, fast and reliable. Customer support responds within a week at most. All that requires real infrastructure and real work. Every single day.

So pray tell why should the registrar, sponsor and the ICANN get 10, 20 or more % of what I pay for all of that? For one single domain? Every single year. It honestly drives me crazy.

And don’t even get me started on those new TLDs, pure cancer. Not even talking about the obviously shady stuff, but also nice-sounding things like .art 🤮

The Internet is infrastructure. We deserve an at-cost, straightforward process to put our stuff there; no need for leeching gatekeepers and shady middlemen.

Free domains for everyone!

If domains don’t cost anything, what’s going to stop spammers from registering literally all of the domain names? Spam domains are already a huge problem, and I can only imagine that problem getting much worse if the gate is not kept.

Handshake DNS has a cost but no one is ripped off since it is with a crypto that gets burned so everyone earns since burning -> deflation