Perhaps my understanding is wrong, but I thought Verisign is the only registrar and operator for .com domains--other registrars like GoDaddy or this Canadian company simply resell Verisign registrations, which they get at a wholesale price.
Ofcourse Verisign controls .com. That was never in question.
Again, there are millions of use cases where .com doesn't matter.
You alluded to some control that some large entity (which I only assume to be Verisign) exercise over every important domain. I take it that was never the case?
If that were the case then Amazon and practically everyone else wouldn't be running under .com which of course is managed by Verisign.
Will also note that Amazon is a registrar but relies (as others do) on markmonitor.com to be the registrar for their own domain .com name. Ditto for google which is also a registrar. So they could be the registrar for their own .com domain but choose not to do so.
No, there is only one .com Registry: Verisign. There's multiple Registrars (the companies you as an individual typically buy your domains at) for .org just as there are for .com
It's interesting that Verisign, a private company, controls the authoritative directory of all .com, .net, .tv, .cc, .name top-level domains and that their patents allow them to hold absolute control over the process.
"Natural Competition" in this space can never be. What you're seeing is exactly how this space turns out. Verisign controls the registry for the .com TLD. They run the centralized authority that ultimately says if a .com domain is "legit" or not.
The Registrars like Namecheap and friends are just the messengers authorized to register .com domains into this larger database and they pay Verisign for the privilege to do so.
While it's possible for anyone to go out and stand up their own .COM zone in DNS, any domains created by that registrar don't actually exist in the eyes of the larger Internet and will not work.
.com is owned by a single company(and other top level domains owned by other companies), why shouldn't more companies own other top level domains?
Also, in regards to gp, saying .com is for all commercial companies is the equivalent of saying all commercial companies have to be in business with Verisign.
Verisign's name grab is more interesting - the most natural spelling of the '.com' TLD in scripts other than Latin. Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.
Now that's going to be fun for people who already own .com domains targeted to those audiences, because I could see people reverting to .com in their native script very easily, and unless you buy the right domains from Verisign, they won't necessarily get to the same domain.
I imagine Verisign will be the only place in the future where when you buy the .com, they'll upsell you on the equivalent .com in various other scripts.
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