Who pays DNS providers ? Is DNS service free ?
Whenever we access a website in the World Wide Web, we are implicitly making queries to many DNS servers in order to know the IP address of the server hosting that website.
Actors involved in a DNS query
When we enter a URL like www.medium.com in the browser, only the communication between us and the website is apparently going on:
Behind the scenes, our computer made a DNS query to another server (usually called DNS resolver or DNS recursive resolver) which itself made several queries to different servers. This is depicted in the following figure.
What are these servers and who owns them ?
The DNS resolver is provided by our Internet Service Provider. Our computer knows its IP address from the moment it starts (for more information see DHCP protocol). This DNS resolver has a list of root name servers and their IP addresses in its software.
The root name servers are the most important servers in the DNS system. They resolve the top level domain of the website (In our example of www.medium.com, a root server gives the name server to contact for .com domain). There are 13 root name servers in the Internet. In the beginning, these were 13 servers exactly, but today they are 13 clusters of servers, each cluster is distributed in different locations around the world. They are operated by different organizations. ICANN maintains one of these name servers.
Then, we have Top Level Domain servers (or TLD servers). Each TLD server manages one or several website extensions (.com, .org, .net, .us, .fr, …). For example, the .com TLD server gives the server to contact to resolve subdomains of medium.com domain. ICANN has the authority over most Top Level Domains and delegates their management to other organizations (such us Verisign which maintains .com domain)
Finally, the authoritative name server for the domain medium.com is the server which knows the IP address associated with www.medium.com and the other subdomains like (ayoubomari.medium.com). It therefore gives the answer the DNS resolver was looking for, which then gives it to our computer. When we register a domain name (in websites like GoDaddy, Bluehost, ...), these registrars maintain the authoritative name server for our website.
Now comes the important question: What these organizations get from answering billions of DNS requests every day ? Who pays them ?
For Authoritative name servers
As mentioned above, these servers are maintained by the domain registrar. The domain registrar gets paid when the website owner registers for that domain and charges them a fee every year.
For TLD servers
When the website owner pays the registrar for getting his website domain name, this registrar pays a fee to a domain name registry which maintains TLD servers.
For Root servers
Apart from ICANN which gets a part of the money the registry gets from a registrar, the other root servers are not paid for that. Here is a quote from Netnod which operates one of the 13 root servers:
What does Netnod get out of being a root server operator?
A warm glow… Like all the other root server operators, Netnod spends money to operate a root server (all operators have their own funding models). Of course, we’ve also built up a lot of unique expertise, which deeply informs our other services. But really, like all the other operators, we do this because we believe it is for the good of the Internet
For DNS resolver
The Internet Service Provider which maintains this server gets paid for our internet access, so it is paid for the bandwidth we use to contact the DNS resolver.
Conclusion
I shared these thoughts when I remembered that I heard many times that Internet is not owned by anybody. This is correct in some sens and wrong in another. Here I just gave the example of DNS system which is a tiny part of the Internet. Hopefully, I share more about some of the other parts in the future. For the moment, let’s conclude this article this way: Who said the Internet should be free ?
