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Comment by ilurk | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit confused about the whole DNS thing.

Namely when I buy a domain name from who exactly am I buying it from?

Put in other words, what's the best way to buy a domain name and avoid the middleman fees?

In terms of renewal, does it make a difference if you buy it from the root TLD authority (not sure if saying something silly here) or some squatter/middle-man/domain-park?

Who decides on the price hike for the next year?

I find the whole DNS management quite broken. The new TLDs is a good example. .dev got owned by Google and a bunch of other TLDs got acquired by some VC backed digital-estate company.

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The hierarchy of Internet domain names goes something like this:

ICANN -> TLD operator (registry) -> registrar -> reseller (optional) -> registrant (you)

Historically, who in this chain collected the seigniorage for domain names worth much more than the transaction cost, i.e., email.com? Just whoever snatched it up first, usually a reseller? I always wondered domain names weren't auctioned off like other scarce resources whose initial distribution is controlled by the government, such as wireless spectrum.

> Just whoever snatched it up first

Yes.

So I found this article [1] about domain name transfer. Which clarified one doubt that I had. As I was under the impression that you were hopelessly stuck at paying rent for life middleman (to a reseller or in this case a registrar).

This raises another question. Is it worth starting you own registrar? Or it is fee prohibitive?

[1] http://lifehacker.com/5794507/how-to-jump-ship-from-godaddy-...

Registrars need to pay a yearly fee to ICANN (in the $xx,xxx range if I recall correctly) and significant startup fees as well.

This qualifies you to pay 'wholesale' prices for domain names. Wholesale prices are set by the registry. (e.g. Verisign sets the wholesale price for .com, Afilias for .org, etc.)

It is worth doing if you register a very large number of domain names, like 100,000+. Some large corporations have their own registrar, Google for example. (More recently Google has also entered the registry business, with their new TLDs.)

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