system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Who is the owner of all the .com domain names? When I'm paying for one, what does the company actually do in order to generate it for me? It's not like they've already have it and they'll just hand it over to me. It never existed in the first place.
gpt
Websites are just files on a computer somewhere. That computer has an address, just like your house. But people would rather use a word in the browser to go directly to the site, not the series of numbers which is the address of the computer. And so when someone types in the name, a computer out in the internet needs to convert the word into an address of the specific computer the relevant files are stored in. Someone needs to keep that list and allow for changes, otherwise there would be difficulties reaching the site you want. But people all over the world need the list to be available, so there are computers out there that have all the address information. And they need to be all the same, that way you know what to expect when you use a specific name, no matter where you are. And this is a complicated thing, so smart people have to make sure it always works. And they also have to make sure that if someone wants a name to correspond to their computer and no one else's computer, someone needs to make sure that there are no names used twice. And there are so many people wanting an internet lookup name for their website that it is an important job with lots of work to do, and someone has to pay those people. And if these names were free, big businesses would buy up all the possible names, and you couldn't get any names because they are all gone. Some companies figured out how to get a name registered on the list, so they help others do it, but they need to be able to buy food, so they have to be paid.