I need to confess I never understand who we pay for domain names 🤷🏻
Isn’t that supposed to be a decentralized thing. Who owns them who we get them from if they not taken yet 🤔
Discussion
ICANN, I believe, has a hand in authentication for registrars and coordinates them for the sake of consensus. I've been building websites for seven years now and still don't know the real global structure of the DNS system.
In a decentralized system I think your will need to burn Bitcoin. I’m not an expert but otherwise someone will get richer and game it.
you pay the company that bought the rights for that TLD from ICANN, so ".com" is owned from Verisign, yes, one company controls all .com sites, then you have countries owning their own TLDs, that's ".co.uk", ".fr", ".pt", ".de", etc... Then those companies with a TLD rent you SLDs.
To have the rights to a TLD, you'd need about 100k just for the process of approval (which might get rejected), in the end, ICANN has the full control of everything as they control the root zone. Our only solution to bypass it is to create our own root zone and use that instead.