No one in the world really "owns" a domain name except the Network Information Centre (NIC), or domain name registry. Most of the NICs in the world receive an annual fee from a legal user in order for the legal user to utilise the domain name (i.e. a sort of a leasing agreement exists, subject to the registry's terms and conditions). Depending on the various naming convention of the registries, legal users become commonly known as "registrants" or as "domain holders".

ICANN holds a complete list of domain registries in the world. One can find the legal user of a domain name by looking in the WHOIS database held by most domain registries.

For most of the more than 240 country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), the domain registries hold the authoritative WHOIS (Registrant, name servers, expiry dates etc). For instance, DENIC, Germany NIC holds the authoritative WHOIS to a .DE domain name.

However, some domain registries, such as VeriSign, use a registry-registrar model. There are hundreds of Domain Name Registrars that actually perform the domain name registration with the end-user, such as eNom. By using this method of distribution, the registry only has to manage the relationship with the registrar, and the registrar maintains the relationship with the end-users, or 'registrants'. For .COM, .NET domain names, the domain registries, VeriSign holds a basic WHOIS (registrar and name servers etc). One can find the detailed WHOIS (Registrant, name servers, expiry dates etc) at the registrars.

Since about 2001, most gTLD registries (.ORG, .BIZ, .INFO) have adopted a so-called "thick" registry approach, i.e. keeping the authoritative WHOIS with the various registries instead of the registrars.