Who runs the Internet?

In an earlier posts comment section, Chris Palmer, said he wanted to know why adomain registrar receives money for the registration of an Internet domain and basically by what authority.

I actually wrote a long post on the inner working of the Internet to explain this but it became horribly technical. Basically, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or as they're more commonly known, ICANN) run the show. They're a non-profit international organisation that manage the IP space allocation, along withthe Top-Level Domain (TLD) system. In the case of country code TLDs they are usually delegated out to each country e.g. Nominet for .uk.

Who get's the money for your domain registration? The Registrar that told ICANN etc that you had registered the domain. WHy do tyhey get the money? Admin cost of managing your DNS entry for the world to see. I could go on but I expect people would glaze over, I used to be a DNS Hostmaster you see. If people really must know more then mail me.