this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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Explain Like I'm Five

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Do dns server federeate and who is the authority on a given domian name (programming.dev)
submitted 1 week ago by cactus_head@programming.dev to c/explainlikeimfive@lemmy.world
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Somelse asked about what is DNS, but how are there multiple DNS server. You can buy a domain from cloudflare like say example.org, but how does clouflare get to claim that domain as it's own, and how can there be DNS outages when there are multiple DNS servers? Is there a DNS authority? And does every government have there own DNS servers that point to the main ones?

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[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 week ago

So called root servers are registered with the IANA. They are basically the seeds for the federation. There are rules what these root servers need to do and how they can be queried - and from those few servers it gets spread around the world - but not federated as in "everyone can write back", there are rules who can add what when.

They also tell who owns top level domains (.com, .net, .de, etc). The other replier is wrong: they do not sell individual domains.