The domain market was born from the end of a monopoly
Until 1998 one company sold every .com. A government decision split the market in three — and that split is still the map of who to call when your domain breaks.
One company sold every .com.
For six years, “which registrar should I choose” was not a question you could ask.
The kind of company you buy a domain from today did not exist as a category.
Then a government decision created it.
The three roles everyone treats as the natural furniture of the domain world — registry, registrar, registrant — did not appear because a market found its shape. They were drawn on purpose, by policy, to break apart a monopoly that had become an embarrassment.
The middleman you buy your domain from is a deliberate act of government.
One door
In 1993 the U.S. National Science Foundation created the InterNIC and split the work across three contractors: Network Solutions handled registration, AT&T ran directory and database services, General Atomics provided information services. Name assignment — .com, .net, .org — went to Network Solutions. And for the entire life of that agreement, this one company was both the registry — the single database of who holds which name — and the only registrar, the only door through which a name could be obtained. There was no second door.
Registration was free at first, carried by public money. Then in September 1995, as commercial demand exploded, Network Solutions began to charge: one hundred dollars for a two-year registration, fifty a year. One company, one price, no alternative.
The tension was not only about price. Thirty percent of each fee flowed, until 1998, into a National Science Foundation “intellectual infrastructure” fund — domain holders were financing a public-policy purpose they had no say over. Trademark disputes multiplied. The rule that decided who got a name — first come, first served — rested on a single company’s internal policy. A fast-growing, globally consequential market hung on the decisions of one firm, at a high price and with no competition.
A forged letter
The stakes were not theoretical. One of the most famous early domain thefts happened precisely because there was one door.
In 1994 Gary Kremen registered sex.com to his company. In 1995 a man named Stephen Cohen sent a letter to Network Solutions claiming Kremen’s company wished to abandon the name; the letter, as the courts later established, was fraudulent. Network Solutions transferred the name to Cohen without checking with Kremen. Kremen had nowhere to turn: the same single company was the registry, the registrar, and effectively the dispute process too.
After years of litigation, the federal appeals court held in 2003 that a domain name is property that can be stolen, and ordered Cohen to pay Kremen $65 million. Until then it was not even legally settled whether the name could be yours at all.
The decision that ordered competition
On June 5, 1998, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a statement of policy the industry still calls the White Paper. It set four principles for handing the naming system to the private sector: stability, competition, private bottom-up coordination, and representation.
Here, competition became official policy.
The mechanics arrived in an amendment. In October 1998, Amendment 11 to the government’s agreement with Network Solutions required a Shared Registration System — a design that cut the company in two. The registry function stayed with Network Solutions, now a wholesaler running the shared database. The registrar function was pried open to unlimited competition: any accredited company could sell names into that database on equal terms. A newly created non-profit, ICANN, was handed the job of accrediting them.
Competition in the domain market was created by a contract amendment.
The first five competitive registrars were named on April 21, 1999: America Online, CORE, France Telecom/Oléane, Melbourne IT, and register.com. The testbed opened five days later. A later amendment fixed the wholesale price the registry could charge each registrar at nine dollars per name per year, eighteen for a new registration. The retail layer — the price you actually pay, the interface, the support, the upsells — was thrown to the market. The wholesale layer stayed regulated.
The split was not arbitrary. An extension can have only one authoritative database — two competing .com registries could not coexist, because nothing would decide which one tells the truth about a name. The registry is therefore a natural monopoly; competition is possible only at the layer in front of it. The monopoly did not disappear: the reform compressed it to a single point and opened everything ahead of it.
It did not happen this way everywhere
This was an American answer to an American problem, and it did not become universal at once. Many country-code extensions ran for years as both registry and seller — operated by a national community or university, handing out names directly, with no registrar layer. The competitive, separated model spread gradually, wherever the operator adopted it. The three-actor structure is not the internet’s natural order. It is a decision, taken country by country — or not taken at all.
For a decision-maker with names in several countries, this means the map differs by extension. Responsibility boundaries fall in different places, the registry knows one thing and the registrar another, and the route to dispute resolution changes. One portfolio, several jurisdictions, several structures — each to be learned on its own.
The map of accountability
This is where the history stops being trivia and becomes a map — and almost no domain holder can read it.
It helps to be precise about the three roles. The registry keeps the authoritative database of a given extension — say .com — and knows whether a name exists at all and to whom it is assigned. The registrar is the company where you buy and manage the name; it writes into the registry’s database on your behalf, over a standard protocol. The registrant is you — and I deliberately do not write “owner,” because over the name you hold not property but a fixed-term right to use. That distinction is a subject of its own. What matters here: in the chain you are the last link, you never speak to the registry directly, yet you carry the consequence when any layer errs.
What the registrant actually holds is an entry: one line in the registry’s database that points your name in a direction. What you rent is the direction itself: the network turns toward you when it is asked about your name. If that line falls into the wrong hands, the name stays identical letter for letter — it just points to someone else now. Kremen learned this the most expensive way.
When a name is hijacked, when a transfer stalls for a week, when a renewal quietly fails — the first real question is which layer owns the problem. A registry lock lives at the registry. The transfer authorization code, the contact record, the renewal date, the account credentials — those live at the registrar. The DNS that actually routes your traffic may live at a third party entirely.
Twenty years on the infrastructure side leave you with one reflex: before anything else, establish whose layer the problem sits on. That answer decides who is even able to fix it, and how fast. Call a company that cannot touch the problem and you lose days you did not have.
The same split is why you are not trapped. Because the registry became shared in 1999, you can leave a registrar and keep your name — portability was the entire point of the exercise. Most holders never use the right the whole structure was built to give them.
And the price still carries the old shape. The wholesale registry fee for a .com sits at $10.26 in 2025 under the current Verisign–ICANN agreement — barely moved from the nine dollars fixed in 1999, while the retail market around it grew into more than two thousand competing storefronts. The regulated layer held. The open layer did the changing.
Knowing the map is measured in money and risk. If you know where the boundary runs, you know the registry lock is worth asking your registrar to arrange, because it stops the worst hijacks. You know an absurd renewal price is your registrar’s margin decision, not your cost of goods — and you have somewhere to move the name. And you know which provider to call first when the minute counts. The most common failure comes from the same blindness: the holder calls the registrar when the DNS is at a fourth provider, or assumes the registrar grants the registry lock — when it only requests it. A wrong mental map is not ignorance. No one ever showed them how many parties stand behind the name.
Read the layers as exposure and you feel trapped. Read them as a map and you have room to move.
The same company name
There is a final turn the architects of the 1999 system did not plan for. The competition they distributed has started pooling back: a handful of groups — among them GoDaddy, Newfold Digital, and Tucows — hold much of the retail market under dozens of brands. And Newfold Digital today owns Network Solutions — the 1993 monopolist — and register.com, one of the five challengers sent in to break it. The incumbent and its first competitor now file under the same parent.
The split was drawn so you would always have somewhere else to go. That right still stands. The number of genuinely separate places to go is smaller than the number of logos suggests, and most holders have never checked which of their names sit behind the same parent.
Magyar változat: [zona.hu/a-piac-egy-monopolium-vegebol-szuletett/]