Internet domains are not property, and to the extent they are, they are all the property of ICANN. The delegation system is somewhere between leasing and feudalism.
You can tell it's not property because the one thing that's guaranteed to result in losing a domain is failing to pay the fees.
The idea that first registration entitles someone to (a) waste a finite resource forever and (b) sell it at arbitrary prices later was fought out in the early 00s, and the real WIPO trademark system won. A number of people who had squatted the names of famous companies in hope of extorting a payout were disappointed.
"You can tell it's not property because the one thing that's guaranteed to result in losing a domain is failing to pay the fees."
Don't pay your property taxes and you lose your property. Courts have argued that domains are property countless times, and they are treated absolutely as such. They are in the sense of contract law, with rights and grants, but obviously are a virtual good, of sorts.
"The idea that first registration entitles someone to (a) waste a finite resource forever and (b) sell it at arbitrary prices later was fought out in the early 00s, and the real WIPO trademark system won."
I specifically excluded trademark infringement, so why are you arguing that case? But yes, someone can "waste a finite resource forever" (by paying the same fee that a "useful" use of it would). Those are the rules of the game.
That may be true according to the current authorities running the show, but clearly those rules are far beyond their useful lifetime now. For practical purposes, domains often function as a primary form of identification, for websites, email and other functions. Both the domain registrant and anyone trying to reach them have a reasonable expectation that the identity in question will not silently and suddenly be changed, a huge amount of everyday activity now depends on that expectation, and the consequences of violating it can be severe. We are well past the point where such critical infrastructure should not be in the hands of private businesses or individuals without sufficient regulation to safeguard the common good.
I don't think anyone disagrees that those are the rules we have. I think everyone who actually creates websites thinks those rules are not working as intended and should be changed.
I refuse to believe that having speculators pay for thousands and thousands of empty domains is "working as intended".
well, yeah, I get that. I spent 3 months trying to come up with something decent for the last one, and it did drive a lot of imaginative thinking about the brand, which was actually useful.
I'm more thinking of the waste and expense. Clogging up infrastructure with utterly useless "holding pages". People spending vast amounts in registration fees in the hope of getting that big win. And that big win being at the expense of a company that genuinely needs the name but is forced to spend massively more than it needs to in order to get it.
If this was what was intended, then whoever designed it was evil.
Also a corporation is a person because judges have ruled that too.
I certainly agree that opinions can differ whether various things (e.g. intellectual property) should be called property or not. But personally I don't like the dilution of the concept. "Ownership" of a URL is more like a contractual right.
As for your home/land, if you don't pay property taxes the govt may begin a legal proceeding to seize it which must satisfy the usual checks and balances when the govt wants to violate your rights. Then they probably auction it off and the balance minus your back taxes goes to you. The point is you have real rights. Meanwhile your domain may be worth a million bucks at auction but you aren't getting squat because you forgot to pay the $12 fee, or violated some other detail in the contract.
> You can tell it's not property because the one thing that's guaranteed to result in losing a domain is failing to pay the fees.
There's a sibling comment that points out that courts recognize it as property, and certainly trademarks are a similar "property" that requires active enforcement.
But while the law is a good authority because they've gone through many disputes and have had to work out good arguments, I don't think it's the final authority; laws can change after all.
That a domain requires upkeep doesn't make it not property. Even in the absence of taxes, your house or any of your stuff requires some degree of upkeep.
But a domain is certainly not chattel, and intangible property always does seem like... not property. (Though, even with tangible property, it feels fuzzy, and that's part of why fences are used to reify borders.)
To my mind, a bigger issue with calling it property is that there's not necessarily a single registry system.
My thought experiment is to ask what we'd do without registrars. We'd all simply advertise our domains to the DNS servers, with all the obvious conflicts that registration is meant to avoid. And we'd have to resolve those conflicts by having the DNS providers agree that a particular advertisment was correct. I think that gets a bit closer to the heart of what "owning a domain name" means.
Owning an agreement with these entities to manage those disputes looks very similar to any other kind of security or bond. It also has qualities of an asset: you can trade it, it's not very liquid, you can derive an income from it by developing things on it, etc. That's why I lean on the side of the "domains are property" camp.
You can tell it's not property because the one thing that's guaranteed to result in losing a domain is failing to pay the fees.
The idea that first registration entitles someone to (a) waste a finite resource forever and (b) sell it at arbitrary prices later was fought out in the early 00s, and the real WIPO trademark system won. A number of people who had squatted the names of famous companies in hope of extorting a payout were disappointed.