I remember asking this question a couple of years ago, but I can’t remember the answer…
You pay a registrar a couple of bucks to have ICANN assign it to you. That’s good for a year (generally) and then you pay every year after that. You don’t need to do anything with it; you just gotta keep paying. Baremetal is my registrar. They do Canadian top-level domains and the standard ones. There is a billion registrars out there.
I use 1and1 and have never had any issues with them. I like them as you can get private registration of your domain for no extra cost. Right now they are having a sale on domain names.
Here ya go:
thanks, all. got the names i wanted. now it’s a matter of setting up the web-page.