Registering domains and using IP addresses ( https://internet.am/en/domain-registration ), users rarely wonder who invented them and who distributes them. Unlike country dialing codes, which are allocated by the UN, IP addresses and domains are allocated by the Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers - ICANN, a non-profit organization registered in the state of California, USA. For a long time, ICANN worked under a contract with the US Department of Commerce, but since 2016, ICANN https://www.icann.org has been an independent organization.
ICANN provides IP addresses through regional registries - ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC and AFRINIC. Armenian users who intend to obtain IP addresses contact RIPE https://www.ripe.net, a public organization registered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. To obtain a block of IP addresses, you must become a member of RIPE and pay annual membership fees of about 1,500 euros. After which the new RIPE member receives blocks of IP addresses and has the ability to use these IP addresses in its network. Typically, RIPE members are telecom operators who, for a fee, make the resulting addresses available to their users. However, large organizations can use IP addresses within their networks, without providing them to a third party.
Hosting users https://internet.am/en/hosting-packages have the opportunity to get their own dedicated IP address, but such a requirement arises quite rarely. Typically, hosting users get their disk space on a large server with a single IP address. When accessing this server, the requesting browser, along with the site name, also sends SNI - a code that allows you to select this site from a large number of sites located on the hosting server. This approach allows you to economically use IP addresses, the number of which is limited to 4 billion. There are, of course, new version IP addresses, the number of which is almost unlimited, but traditional IP addresses today dominate the Internet space.
Domain names are also allocated by ICANN, but the procedure is different. First, servers were created in which a table of correspondence between the IP address of a computer and its specific name was recorded. This was done to make it easier for people to remember names instead of a long string of numbers. As the number of computers on the Internet grew and their geography expanded, it was decided to structure the names of these computers according to two characteristics - geographical and general.
The most popular generic domain is .som; today the number of generic domains exceeds a thousand. To structure computer names by geography, a table of two-letter codes of countries and territories https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/iso- country-codes/ was taken from the ISO reference book https://www.iso.org/home.html - an international organization standards. As computers became available in different countries and territories, it was decided to transfer ownership of the correspondence table to a local organization in each country. In Armenia, such an organization is the NGO Internet Society https://www.isoc.am/, which maintains a register of domain names .am and .հայ․ In general, the user's browser first queries the ICANN servers and finds out from their main table the IP address of the server where the matching records for the .am and .հայ domains are stored. After that, from the local table it finds out the IP address to which this domain of the .am zone is assigned. հայ. Having learned the IP address, the browser contacts the web page that is hosted on this server. Of course, today this procedure is much more complicated.
The Internet Society isoc.am stores a correspondence table on its servers, but entries in this table are made by domain name registrar companies, https://internet.am. Domain registration is a one-time action, the record is stored in the Internet Society table for one year. Of course, you can reserve the number of entries for several years.
Thus, it can be stated that IP addresses and domains do not belong to this country and are not issued by the UN, although a number of states are unsuccessfully trying to transfer ICANN rights to this interstate structure. The correct name of the country domain is country code top level domain (ccTLD).