[RESOLVED] How do companies become ISPs?

Who decides who can become an ISP? Does it have something to do with the W3C? Does it have something to do with which companies paid for the infrastructure of cables and crap? If that is the case how did AOL become a provider?

On a similar note how do companies sell domain names? Who gave them domain names to sell? (I understand how squatters work though)

So many questions. I've have now shown my complete ignorance if I haven't already I'm sure. Thanks for any enlightenment.

Anyone can become an ISP; you just need to provide some sort of infrastructure, e.g. PSTN, ISDN, DSL, Cable, T1/T3 or E1/E3 etc etc so that companies/customers can connect through you. You'd also need a very hefty connection to the internet, normally through a number of peering companies.

Internic or whoever they are now are in charge of the .com addresses. Each country has a company or organisation in charge of their TLD (top level domain (i.e. .ie, .de, .se etc.)), and one purchases from them.

So all these companies like godaddy and mydomain that sell the domains are just middlemen for purchasing domain names?

Pretty much /shrug/

Thanks for the enlightenment. It's good to have that mystery resolved.

Some other ones you might want to delve into if you're curious:
IP WAN Routing and DNS