It's IANA that owns it. Ofc they are their own registrar and they also oversee the DNS. They might pay something to Verisign(owner of .com) for it maybe? Not that domain costs are anything of note compared to hosting, just find the registration of that domain to be interesting considering even iana.org uses a more traditional, albeit enterprise, registrar (CSC Global).

[–] verstra 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Verisign owning .com seems like bullshit to me. TLDs are a public good, which should be operated by independent non-profits or contracted to a company to operate, using strict rules about pricing and such.

[–] Scoopta 1 points 3 weeks ago

I suppose? Most TLDs are owned by companies. They can always compete with each other on prices so I'm not sure I agree. Although given Verisign owns 2 of the 3 public use legacy domains with .org owned by a non-profit due to its non-profit nature I can see your point. Especially since IPs are managed by non-profits, why not TLDs too? Then again with the gTLD program any sufficiently large company can own their own TLD now so it probably doesn't make sense given modern usage.