Do you know who owns the Internet?

I was recently analyzing a company called GoDaddy for my portfolio. You might have heard of it — they're the world's largest domain registrar, the company most people use to buy and host their website's name.

The stock is down 52% over the last year. And largely flat over the last ten.

As I was understanding the company, it sent me down a rabbit hole. Who actually owns the internet?

Imagine you want to start a business and you come up with a name, My Cool Company. Before the product or the logo, you’ll think about buying the domain: mycoolcompany.com. You go to a website like GoDaddy, Namecheap, or Squarespace, type in the name you want, pay between $12 and $50, and it’s yours.

Except it isn't.

You don't own the domain. You're just renting it. Once you stop paying the annual renewal fee, someone else can register it.

So who are you renting this domain from? And who actually owns the internet?

Companies like GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace, and Cloudflare are the licensed middlemen of the internet, also known as registrars.

Their job is to register domains on your behalf and manage renewals, billing, customer support, and DNS settings.

Behind every registrar sits a registry. The registry maintains the master database for a particular domain extension.

For .com and .net, that registry is Verisign, a company based in Virginia. It doesn't matter whether you buy a .com domain through GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace, or Cloudflare. They all ultimately register it through Verisign.

Verisign manages more than 170 million .com and .net domains, generates roughly $1.7 billion in annual revenue, and operates with ~70% EBITDA margins and runs one of the most profitable, least visible monopolies in technology.

Other domain endings like .org, .io are managed by different registries. Every country code, like .uk, .de, or .ai, also has its own designated registry operator.

One level above this sits a non-profit in Los Angeles called ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN doesn't sell domains. It decides which domain extensions exist, appoints the organizations allowed to operate them, and accredits companies like GoDaddy and Namecheap to sell them.

In simplified form, the entire system looks like this:

A surprisingly centralized system for something we like to think of as decentralized.

Every time a domain is registered or renewed anywhere in the world, ICANN collects a small transaction fee, currently about $0.20.

Now where do countries fit into this?

Every country is handed its own registry and the government decides who runs its extensions. Sometimes a state agency. Sometimes a private company the government licenses.

Every time someone registers a .uk or a .us domain, the country gets a wholesale fee through whoever runs that country's registry.
GoDaddy collects from you. The registry collects from GoDaddy. Depending on the country, the registry either is the government, or pays the government a cut to operate it on its behalf.

In the late 1980s, when engineers were carving up the early internet, every country got a two-letter code based on its ISO designation (International Organization for Standardization). The UK got .uk. Germany got .de. The United States got .us.

Anguilla, a small Caribbean island with around 15,000 people, became .ai.

For decades, almost nobody cared. There were barely any websites with the .ai extension.

In 2018, Anguilla generated just $2.9 million from .ai domain registrations.

Then ChatGPT arrived, and suddenly every AI startup wanted a .ai website.

By 2025, .ai domain revenue had reached ~$85 million. Nearly half of Anguilla's national budget. The government used the money to reduce public debt, improve roads, expand renewable energy projects, and fund public services.

If AI is creating more startups, more websites, and more domain registrations than ever before, then the companies sitting in the middle of all this activity should be thriving too.

So why is GoDaddy, the world's largest domain registrar, down more than 50% from its peak?

That's maybe next week.

Full Disclosure: I don’t have an open position in GoDaddy or Verisign. This is not financial advice. The purpose of this essay is educational.

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