One Rupee, One Domain, One Existential Crisis

It began innocently enough.

I was sitting in front of my laptop, vaguely productive, when I remembered an old idea I had for a blog. I had been toying with it for years. Something quiet and personal. A place to dump the thoughts that didn’t belong on social media, mostly because I don’t have one.

So I went to GoDaddy, and typed in a name I had been thinking about. It was available. Just like that. Like nobody had even thought of it before.

It was called nullvelocity.com.

I liked how it sounded. Slightly mysterious, vaguely philosophical. It felt like the sort of name a thoughtful person might use to write slow, honest things. I did not know what I would post there, but I knew I liked the way it looked in the browser address bar. And then I saw the price.

₹1. One rupee, less than I pay for a cup of filter coffee at my local restaurant I frequent. Naturally, I clicked.

Of course, the ₹1 only covered the first year of a three-year plan. There were other charges too; domain protection, privacy settings, security features I did not fully understand but was too afraid to ignore. By the time it was done, I had paid around ₹3,500 (~$40). A small price, I told myself, for something that felt oddly significant.

I now had my own domain. A name. A flag planted in the soil of the internet. nullvelocity.com was real. It worked. And for about ten minutes, I felt like I had done something meaningful.

Then I started to overthink.

Who gave GoDaddy the right to sell me that name? What even is a domain? Who owns these names, really? And just like that, a small purchase turned into a deep spiral about digital ownership and the people who quietly run the web behind the scenes.

Life Before Domain Names

Before you could type in google.com or bbc.com or nullvelocity.com, you had to type numbers. Specifically, IP addresses. Strings like 172.217.166.46. Every website had one.

The early internet was basically a phone book with no names. Just numbers. And if you wanted to visit a website, you had to know its exact numeric code. There were no bookmarks. No search engines. No autocomplete.

People started keeping handwritten lists of which number pointed to which server. At some point, this became a shared file called hosts.txt, which was passed around by researchers and engineers. But as the internet grew, this system fell apart.

There were too many machines. Too many users. Too many numbers.

Someone had to bring order.

Enter Jon Postel

It turns out that back in the early days of the internet, there was a man named Jon Postel. If the internet had a quiet librarian godfather, it was him. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Postel more or less single handedly managed the domain naming system. He kept the records. Assigned the names. Made the rules.

There were no corporations, no marketing teams, no splashy dashboards. Just one man and a growing pile of responsibilities.

At one point, he even had the power to reroute all internet traffic with a few emails. That’s not a joke. He literally sent emails asking to redirect root servers and everyone just… did it. Because it was Jon.

He wasn’t after power. He did not make money from it. He just saw it as his job. The keeper of the names.

Of course, this could not last. The internet got bigger. Commercial. Governments got involved. And eventually, the system moved into the hands of an organization called ICANN.

ICANN and the Illusion of Ownership

After Postel’s death, the system he had managed was handed over to a newly formed body called ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

ICANN is not a company. It is not a government agency. It is a global nonprofit based in California. It manages the domain name system. Maintains root servers. Coordinates who gets what name. And makes sure the entire digital world does not collapse under its own weight.

What About Country Domains Like .in?

Every country has its own slice of the internet. These are called country code top-level domains, or ccTLDs. For India, it is .in.

Technically, ICANN still controls the topmost layer; the root. But it does not manage each country’s domain directly. Instead, it delegates control to local authorities.

In India’s case, .in domains are managed by NIXI - the National Internet Exchange of India. This is a government-backed body that sets the rules for who can register .in domains, oversees the system, and ensures that it runs according to national regulations.

So no, ICANN does not own .in. India does. But it was ICANN that gave India the right to manage it.

That is the nuance, ICANN holds the root, but hands over the branches.

It is like having admin rights on a shared work document. You can edit it, rename it, even manage how it looks. But the original file lives in someone else’s drive. They can change your access, delete the file, or move it without telling you. You are part of it but not in charge of it.

And in the case of the internet, that is ICANN. Even here in India. Even when the domain ends in .in.

So when I paid ₹3,500 for nullvelocity.com, what I was really doing was leasing that name. ICANN allows domain registrars to allocate names. Those registrars, like GoDaddy, rent the names out to people like me.

I do not own nullvelocity.com. Not really. I am just paying to use it for now.

It is like renting an apartment. You decorate it, live in it, tell people it is your place. But you know deep down that it is not really yours. Miss a payment, and you are out. The keys change hands. The nameplate gets replaced. Nothing stays.

So What Did I Really Buy?

I bought the illusion of ownership.

But it is an illusion I am happy to live with.

For ₹3,500, the price of about 350 cups of filter coffee in Bangalore, I now have a little patch of internet where I can think out loud. Where I can build quietly. Where I can exist without hashtags, followers, or the burden of being interesting.

It is not much. But it is mine. Or at least, it feels like it.

And maybe that is the point.

Not everything needs to be permanent. Sometimes, it is enough to show up, put your name on something, write a few honest words, and quietly step away.

Even if it is just a name on a screen.

I do not own the internet. I never did.

But for now, I have a little space to call my own. And maybe, for someone like me, that is more than enough.