Weighing In on Ron Paul vs. ronpaul.com

Now that the Grammys are over, and without any breaking news about Kim Kardashian or Lindsey Lohan, the event grabbing everyone's attention is the fact that Ron Paul is finally taking action against the operators of ronpaul.com. What's disappointing is the sensationalistic and misleading headlines accompanying all the news articles, accusing Ron Paul of invoking the United Nations to steal someone else's private property.

Unfortunately, it's typical of too many even within libertarian circles that they shoot their mouths off before doing any thinking about an issue. They're too interested in pulling a gotcha or expressing Schadenfreude about exposing hypocrisy to actually analyze what is going on. Particularly disappointing to me was the glibness with which people such as the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) publicized this issue. You would think that they, of all people, would have done a little more research. Instead, in trying to gloat about their ideological purity, they really stepped in it.

I'm not even going to touch the part about "Ron Paul appealing to the UN", since that has already been described in great detail by other people in multiple comment threads across the Internet. To make a long story short, when registering a domain name with ICANN, you agree to arbitration in case of a dispute, and WIPO is one of the authorized arbitrators. So Dr. Paul's lawyers are just following the rules based on the system as it is currently set up. We all have to deal with the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be.

What I'm concerned about is the characterization that Dr. Paul is seeking to seize a piece of private property. Not true. The .com top level domain (TLD) was created by the federal government. Websites with .com endings were first awarded to companies that were closely cooperating with the government in the development of the Internet, and only gradually were able to be registered by private entities. The management of the .com TLD was initially managed by the Department of Defense, later the National Science Foundation, and then a series of companies.

Once the .com TLD was created, every single .com URL able to be created was brought into existence. Ronpaul.com, ronpaul1.com, ronpaul14876.com, x13ytu78z.com and infinite permutations based on words, names, and characters all exist. Even though they may not be registered, they still exist, and because they exist someone has a right to register and control them. The question then becomes, who has that right? Since you're privatizing a domain name that originated as something the government created, does the domain name rightfully belong to the first person to register the URL or to the person who already owns the trademark, has that name, does business under that name, etc.?

Consider the case of patents. We may disagree with the system's existence, how the system was created, and the fact that it's now first to file, but from a moral perspective, if one person comes up with an idea, but another is the first to file for a patent, the proper patent holder should be the creator, not the filer.

Or look at privatization of government-owned concerns in the Soviet Union, France, the US and other socialist countries. Do those government companies that are privatized rightfully belong to the politically connected or to those who paid big bucks at rigged government-run auctions, or do they belong to the citizens/taxpayers/workers? I lean towards the Rothbardian syndicalist position on that one. When state governments in the US turn public highways into toll roads, are those really examples of free market privatization or are they in fact public-private partnerships, a.k.a. fascism?

The domain name system is similar to those examples. Not every domain name is analogous to a parcel of pre-existing land that is available for homesteading. Instead there are a combination of domain names with pre-existing claims on them mixed in along with homesteadable domain names. The government and the later managers of the TLDs realized that there would be inevitable disputes due to the registration of domain names incorporating trademarks, personal names, business names, etc. that would infringe on the rights of third parties. But rather than creating a system that protected those existing rights from the outset, the government went ahead with the creation of a nationalized domain name system, bringing into existence a system in which there would be property rights disputes and then punting on resolution of those disputes.

The domain name system was eventually "privatized" by turning it over to a select few companies, although the federal government still remains ultimate control over the domain name system. The system allows anyone to register a domain name, regardless of whether or not a potential dispute exists. Any disputes have to go to court or to arbitration. Perhaps this could have been avoided had there a multiplicity of TLDs in existence from the creation of the domain name system, such as .person or .name, or had there been a different means of addressing websites. But again, we have to deal with the system as it was created, not as we wish it should be.

There are a lot of people claiming that Dr. Paul should have been the first person to register ronpaul.com and that it's just his tough luck that someone scooped him. Had we a truly free market Internet, that would be true; but we don't. Think of the dispute this way: the government creates ronpaul.com and says that it alone has the sole authority to determine who gets to own it, trademarks be damned. It then allows a free-for-all, allowing anyone to register it, even if it's not actually Ron Paul. The owners of ronpaul.com have benefited from the government's creation of ronpaul.com, and like any other cybersquatter their actions aren't that different from any other "entrepreneur" who seeks to profit from some government action. From Hamilton's cronies purchasing government bonds to defense contractors selling overpriced, underperforming military hardware, there's always someone out there looking to make a quick buck off the taxpayers. That doesn't mean that their actions are in any way an example of the free market.

What would a true free market in computer networks, network addresses, and domain names look like? I'm certainly not the person to ask, as my knowledge of the technical know-how behind the Internet is necessarily limited. But I don't think it would be beyond the realm of possibility to imagine multiple competing Internets, networks that compete based on access price, amount of information able to be accessed, network speed, etc. Networks could develop their own methods of addressing, and domain names would in fact originate as a creation of the market, not of government fiat. And hopefully we wouldn't have these types of trademark disputes. But that's not what we have today. We have a system that was created by the government, that is still controlled by the government, and which is still trying to sort through the myriad problems forced on it by government. We have to deal with this system as it is, not as we wish it to be.