Internet domain names: Property rights and institutional innovation

This chapter examines the commercialization of the Internet, which has initiated a global debate over privatizing and internationalizing the responsibility for managing the Internet domain name system. A new international regime is being organized around the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The chapter analyzes the emergence of this new regime, drawing upon empirical literature on the economics of property rights and related concepts of international regime change. Property rights conflicts that emerged with the growth of the Internet domain names are analyzed. An efficient property rights regime in domain names is presented and contrasted with the new property regime. The comparison shows that the path of institutional change is strongly affected by conflicts over the distributional issues inherent in the definition of property rights.