Hey All, Do I have to buy a domain for a website??? Like can't I just start my own say it's called www.imthebest.com (If it's not already taken)... But why do I have to buy it off someone??? How do they own the internet??? Please point me in the right direction. Thanks!!!

You aren't buying the domain name, you are 'leasing' it. The reason that you have to lease it, is so that there is control and 12 people don't all attempt to use www.imthebest.com at the same time. Why there is cost involved?? Partly to cover the admin costs of keeping track of all of this, partly to make some money so that someone is motivated to do the 'registrar' job. The best thing is to find a good, cheap registrar. I like www.godaddy.com. At GoDaddy, .com domains cost $7 - $9 per year and they have a good online system for managing your domains. At VeriSign (the original registrar), .com domains cost $35 per year. If you don't lease a domain, your website will be accessible only by your server's IP address, which for some people is fine.

Well, can't I do it myself somehow??? Maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but I should be able to.

No. You can't just create a domain name yourself without paying. I think Don made that pretty clear.

The only thing that you can do on your own is have people access your site by IP address. You could set up a webserver with your own domain name (say www.mydomain.com), but the only people that could get to it, would be people that put that domain name and IP address in the host file of their system. But in general, people wouldn't find your site by name because your domain name would not be in the DNS server around the world. The only way to get a domain name into the DNS system, is to go thru a registrar. And none of them are free.

You can get free co.nr domain name here: http://www.freedomain.co.nr/ But much better to buy something like .com anyway