I thought it would be cool to have my own TLD, but apparently it’s all managed by the ICANN, so you can’t just name your website with any TLD you want. There are different prices. But at least you can customize your second level domain. Why aren’t TLDs like this?
But why did everyone agree to that? Couldn’t domains be determined by user, or at least a bit more decentralized? (ex: google.com leads to IP address 1.1.1.1)
DNS isn’t just an address book, it determines ownership. So in a decentralized system I could just spin up some servers that direct anyone in my area trying to reach PayPal to my IP instead.
Insanely, this is kind of how IP addresses are assigned using bgp.