August 08, 2014
American “victims of terrorism” have sued to get their hands on the .ir domain name that indicates a website or email address is in Iran, but the organization that oversees such domain names has said they can’t have it because nobody owns a domain name
The organization says a country’s domain name is like a zip code; no city or county owns its zip codes. They are just there.
The Internet domain name for a country doesn’t belong to that country—or to anyone, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the California-based organization that oversees the Internet.
Plaintiffs who successfully sued Iran, Syria and North Korea as sponsors of terrorism want to seize the three countries’ ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) as part of financial judgments against them.
After the plaintiffs filed suit, a federal judge asked ICANN to comment.
ICANN said it sympathized with the underlying claims against Iran and the other countries, but filed a motion last Tuesday to quash the attempted seizure.
A ccTLD is the two-letter code at the end of a country-specific Internet address, such as .uk for the United Kingdom or .ca for Canada. There are more than 280 of them, all of which need to have managers, administrative contacts and technical contacts who live in the countries they represent. The domains in this case are .ir for Iran and .sy for Syria, plus Arabic script equivalents for each, and .kp for North Korea.
But the domains aren’t property and don’t belong to the countries they point to, ICANN said. Instead, they’re more like zip codes, “simply the provision of routing and administrative services for the domain names registered within that ccTLD,” which are what let users go to websites and send to email addresses under those domains, ICANN wrote.
If ICANN stepped in and reassigned the domains on its own, that would disrupt everyone who uses a domain name that ends in those codes, including individuals, businesses and charitable organizations, the group said.
“Forced re-delegation of these ccTLDs would destroy whatever value may exist in these ccTLDs, would wipe out the hundreds of thousands of domain name registrations in the ccTLDs, and could lead to fragmentation of the Internet,” ICANN wrote in its motion to the court.
ICANN manages Internet addresses under a contract with the US Department of Commerce, and that contract doesn’t allow it to reassign ccTLDs on its own, the organization said. ICANN makes no money from its management of the domain system
ICANN said it has had “very little interaction” with the managers of the three domains, and all those communications have been technical, involving activation of servers or changes in contact information.
Iran’s domains are managed by the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, in Tehran, and hosted on two servers somewhere in Iran and one apparently in Austria, ICANN said.
A total of 530,000 sites have domain names ending in .ir.
The suit seeking to seize .ir was filed by nine US citizens injured in a bombing in Jerusalem in 1997. A US court ruled that Iran backed the bombing carried out by a Palestinian group. It awarded the “victims of terrorism” $109 million and ordered Iran to pay it. Iran has ignored the order and the nine have gone on a hunt for Iranian assets they can seize.
Having tried and failed to seize such assets as cuneiform tablets from Persepolis being analyzed at the University of Chicago, the nine turned their eyes to the domain name system.
ICANN further argued that the US District Court lacks jurisdiction in the case. The jurisdiction argument boils down to the fact that ICANN “is aware of no evidence” that the .ir registry is “used for a commercial activity in the United States.” Sanctions bar most commercial transactions with Iran.
Finally, ICANN argued that it does not have a list of everyone with an .ir account; it is only able to point to where they can be found.
As such, if ICANN handed over control of .ir, unless the current operator in Iran agreed to work with the “new owners,” the entire namespace would effectively disappear. In other words, the bulk of the “value” of the assets would immediately vanish as soon as they were handed over.
