When registering a website, who gets the money?

I've been thinking about this for a long time. Is there some kind of neutral body that keeps the registry of all the sites on the internet?

I'm wondering because I want to know if it is possible to get dirt cheap .com's, but my search would be futile if there is a global flat fee for it.

probably either the registrars have to pay ICANN per domain registered (prob get volume discounts) or the registrars pay ICANN a yearly fee or something.

syns0r said:

probably either the registrars have to pay ICANN per domain registered (prob get volume discounts) or the registrars pay ICANN a yearly fee or something.

Click to expand...

ICANN, so that's the missing link in my mental puzzle

ICANN gets a small fee for each and every name registered on any top level domain (TLD), they call it an "administrative" fee and for .com, for example, it's around 25 cents USD. The base price for each TLD is actually set by the registry for that TLD (and then can be negotiated between that registry and individual registrars, e.g. for the volume discounts mentioned above).

For .com and .net domains, the registry is Verisign. ICANN allowed them to raise the base-price by 7% each year which is why we saw the increased pricing.