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This is like saying that having a trademark in the US is advertising in France because you're paying the USPTO to publish your trademark registration.

If your scenario makes it impossible for someone to do ordinary business in country A but not in country B then it's fundamentally unworkable.

Not merely DNS names, but in IP routing, announcing a route is known as "advertising" it. You and your ISP are literally advertising a path for others to find your site via TCP/IP.

The two obvious problems being that a) you're advertising that so that people in the countries you actually intend to do business in can find it, and b) the same IP address may be hosting thousands of independent sites any subset of which could be intended to be accessed by people in the other jurisdiction, and publishing the route is done for them.

no, that is a ridiculous line of reasoning

Not really.

Why would people pay so much for the $brand_name.com, etc if there wasn't a marketing component to it?

Having a marketable address is not advertising.

I mean I pay for a domain for my homelab. No one else uses it.

Marketing and advertising are two related but distinct functions.