There has been a running joke that former Vice President Al Gore created the internet and therefore owns it. Joking aside, who actually does own the internet? My main question regarding internet ownership has always been who owns unregistered domains? For example, A2 Hosting does domain registration, but we don’t own every unregistered domain, so where does that domain registration money go? And how did the company get control over all of the unregistered domains? This is a confusing quandary, don’t you think?

After some research, it turns out that nobody is profiting from domain registration. There is actually a non-profit organization called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) that is in charge of managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. According to their site “To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn’t have one global Internet.”

So how did ICANN get all of this power? The company Network Solutions once operated the .com, .net, and .org registries, and was the authority of domain registration until many other registrars stepped into the market. Why should one company get all the control? We live in a Capitalistic society, correct? In October 1998, Net Solution’s agreement with the US Department of Commerce was changed because of the need for a Shared Registration System. A company must be approved by the Shared Registration System to become a designated registrar. To register a domain, one must go through a registrar approved by the Shared Registration System.