Are Domain Names Property?

A lawsuit pitting a group of plaintiffs against the governments of Iran, Syria and North Korea has used the D.C. District Court to issue orders to suspend the country-code domain names they use. The federal court issued “writs of attachment” to global domain name system manager ICANN, asking it to “hold” property belonging to the governments, specifically, the country-code domain names: .IR (Iran), .SY (Syria) and .KP (North Korea). If the domain names are considered legal property, they may be subject to seizure and liquidation or transfer to satisfy the plaintiff’s previous judgments. “It’s a dreadful idea,” David Post, a law professor at Temple University, writes in The Washington Post. “[T]he domain name system, like other parts of the critical Internet infrastructure, is and should be treated as a public trust, held and managed for the benefit of the global Internet community.” Further, Post argues, asserting that a U.S. court has the right to issue orders ICANN that other courts cannot, simply because ICANN is U.S.-based, “will not go over well in an international community that already thinks the U.S. government exercises too much control over ICANN, and over Internet infrastructure in general.”