Published: January 30, 2026
The vast majority of internet users have spent the better part of the past 20 years around platforms - massive gathering places built and controlled by giant, faceless entities through which information, entertainment, and even personal communications are funneled.
As these platforms have grown, they have abstracted away the underlying computer networks making up the internet to the point where many internet users believe there is no difference between "the internet" and "Facebook", for example. This couldn't be further from the truth, and thankfully, that foundation is still perfectly intact and functional despite most people not going beyond the confines of some of the biggest spaces built on top of it.
As time has gone on, we have been seeing these platforms exercise more control over what you see and in some cases, what you say. Unfortunately, here in the United States, the First Amendment only (nominally) protects you from government retribution for the things you say. When you're on a privately-owned platform, it's their house and their rules. If they take action against you, there is virtually nothing you can do about it. You agreed to their rules, and more importantly, you agreed to accept their interpretation of their rules as a condition of even being there.
You can think of these platforms as a clump of city-sized skyscrapers that few people ever leave. Disney did a fairly good job of representing this metaphor in the movie Ralph Breaks the Internet back in 2018. Meanwhile, there is life outside these skyscrapers, and plenty of "undeveloped land" for regular people and small local businesses alike to have their own presence.
The internet is artisan by nature. It's extremely versatile, and for the most part, it's pretty flat. As long as you're connected, all it's really concerned with is getting data from point A to point B. The structure, volume, and format of that data is irrelevant - as long as applications on both ends follow the same guidelines[1], the internet can reasonably be expected to shuttle the data to wherever it's addressed.
Here's a hopefully easy concept to grasp: in the developed world, if you want something or someone to get to where you live, you'll typically give them your address. This is an identifier for the physical place on the globe where you live. On the internet, this is most similar to an Internet Protocol, or IP, address. You've probably seen one before - it's a weird string of numbers and dots (or numbers, letters, and colons!) that identifies a specific computer system on the internet. Your home router has one; your mobile phone has one; every server at Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok has one.
No one can be expected to recall all their friends' home addresses from memory,
and the same is true of the internet. I wouldn't blame you for not knowing
Instagram's address is 2a03:2880:f37e:22:face:b00c:0:4420. You probably save
your friend's home address in some sort of contacts app in your smartphone,
right? If you need Bob's address, you go to your contacts app and hit "Bob".
The beauty of the contacts app is that it serves as sort of a "logical" address for your friends. If Bob moves, he might live somewhere else now, but he's still Bob. You can update his entry in your contacts app with his new address, and that updated information is what you see if you go to your contacts app and hit "Bob".
Nerds like me have probably seen where I'm going with this, but the internet has its own contacts app called the Domain Name System, or DNS. I guarantee you've interacted with it before. If you type instagram.com into a web browser, your computer transparently goes to the DNS and gets Instagram's address. If you're wondering why you didn't have to know Instagram's address first like you do with your friends, that's because DNS is a special type of contacts app where Instagram is responsible for keeping their own information updated, not you.
Registering a domain name is like putting an entry in the internet's contacts app so that if you leave these skyscrapers to build your own house in the suburbs, your friends and family still know where to find you and get in touch. There are plenty of reputable domain name registrars all over the world, and fees are usually not that expensive - registrations under most top-level domains like .com and .org are around US $20 per year. I would recommend using a registrar that specializes in domain name registrations without also trying to cross-sell you some sort of web hosting and provides free WHOIS privacy for top-level domains that allow it - I use Hover.com.
With a domain name registration, you are given full control over what lives at that name. It gives you the freedom to direct visitors to your address in a skyscraper or the quaint homestead you're building in the countryside.
It takes a little work to make it your own, but it's liberating.
We tend to call these guidelines "standards" or "protocols". ↩︎