[Ws2-jurisdiction] Issue: Domain seizures by US executive agencies like US customs

[parminder]

Nigel, I quote below Milton Mueller's email of the 24th in full, but
putting in bold some relevant text, which negates your position below on
tlds as property or not , parminder


            Some people have shown a lack of awareness of the nature of
            the Appeals Court decision regarding the .IR ccTLD Paul is
            discussing below. So here is our summary of its import:

             

            The latest decision in the ICANN case departed sharply from
            prior legal precedents. The court looked beyond the narrow
            issue of whether the .IR ccTLD was attachable property. /*It
            assumed, “without deciding,” that “the ccTLDs the plaintiffs
            seek constitute ‘property’ under the Foreign Sovereigns
            Immunity Act*/ and, further, that the defendant sovereigns
            have some attachable ownership interest in them.” Thus
            ICANN’s weak arguments against the property status of TLDs
            had no impact on the decision. Instead, the court refused to
            allow the .IR domain to be seized because:

             

            “the court has the “authority” to “prevent appropriately the
            impairment of an interest held by a person who is not liable
            in the action giving rise to a judgment” — i.e., we are
            expressly authorized to protect the interests of ICANN and
            other entities. Because of the enormous third-party
            interests at stake—and because there is no way to execute on
            the plaintiffs’ judgments without impairing those
            interests—we cannot permit attachment.”

             

            By “requiring ICANN to delegate ‘.ir’ to the plaintiffs,”
            the court opined, the plaintiffs “would bypass ICANN’s
            process for ccTLD delegation” and this would have a harmful
            impact on the global DNS and on ICANN itself.

             

            So, to summarize: /*TLDs may well be attachable property,*/
            but in this case, and in most conceivable ccTLD redelegation
            cases, the court decided that court-ordered seizure of the
            ccTLD would impair the interest of ICANN in a globally
            acceptable delegation process and possible also impair the
            interest of its registrants.

 

--MM





On Wednesday 30 August 2017 06:03 PM, Nigel Roberts wrote:
>
>
> On 30/08/17 12:44, parminder wrote:
>
>> The court took up jurisdiction, and also accepted to treat gtld as
>> sieze-able property, these are the two most important facts of the case.
>
>
> The first contention is correct. The second is demonstrably incorrect.
>
> This case did not involve either gTLDs or domains registered under them.
> It involved the ccTLDs of three countries. .IR, .SY and .KP.
>
> And the court explicitly stated that domain names (of any kind) were
> NOT seizable (attachable).
>
> A different answer might be given under the law of a different
> jurisdiction, of course.
>
> But those are facts in that case.
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