The U.S. Governance On Trademark Rights To Internet Domain Name Resources From The Perspective Of New Institutional Economics

Domain name is a type of online identifiers,whose function is to facilitate the access of the internet by replacing the abstract Internet Protocol Address with concrete characters.Domain name was invented as a response to the growing number of nodes connecting to the internet.Trademark,consisting of given marks,has been used as commercial marks to differentiate products and services.Domain name and trademark possess similar feature as identifiers.Since the 1990s in the twentieth century,the commercialization of the internet had boosted the need of domain names,with their commercial value dramatically increased.As a result,domain name,a technology generated resource,had been beset with conflicts with trademark,a kind of traditional commercial resources,due to their similarities.Hence,a collective action contending for this resource was initiated.For the U.S.,to bring the trademark rights into cyberspace to regulate domain name resources was not only technically viable,but can also serve its political and economic interests.Technically,domain name system is one of the few nodes that demand centralized regulation in the internet.The U.S.dominance over domain name system and its hierarchical management structure can afford America the technical support it needed to regulate domain name resources.Politically and economically,to regulate the cyberspace by making use of the chance of resolving domain name and trademark conflicts can help safeguard the interests of American big enterprises,providing them with a favorable institutional assurance while serving the need of American global information technology strategy.The research question of the paper is how U.S.utilize trademark rights to achieve the control of domain name resources.The study applies the important concepts and theories of New Institutional Economy as theoretical framework,and uses historical analysis approach to conduct a diachronic study about the process of U.S.defining the property rights of domain name resources by means of trademark rights,and establishing the trademark protection institution in cyberspace.The process of U.S.defining the property rights of domain name resources by means of trademark rights can be divided into three stages.The first stage was the technical governance period,in which the trademark value of domain names was only marginal and did not have much impact on traditional enterprises,thus triggering little governmental concerns.On the second stage,the commercialization of internet boosted the value of domain names,intensifying their conflicts with trademarks,which lead to a collective game for the domain name resources and raised concerns of American Commerce Department henceforth.On the third stage,in order to protect the interests of American enterprises and prevent the domain name governance from being internationalized,the U.S government,in disregard of the relevant laws and regulations,utilized the national administrative power to set up the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN),a privately-owned organization,with the purpose to define the property rights of the domain name resources,making them privately-owned by U.S.government.After this,taking the setting-up of ICANN as a starting point,the U.S.consistently tried to reinforce the trademark rights protections in cyberspace by establishing institutions including Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy,Objection and Dispute Resolution,Trademark Clearinghouse,Access to Sunrise Registration and Notification of Registration,Uniform Rapid Suspension,as well as Trademark Post-Delegation Dispute Resolution Policy,so as to defend the interests of big enterprises.There are three research findings based upon aforesaid survey.First,defining property rights of the domain name resources by trademark rights decreased the uncertainty of U.S.commercial enterprises for expected returns in the exploration of reclaiming cyberfrontier,making them more motivated in generating revenue and accumulating wealth,whereby the economic performance had been improved.Second,the trademark rights protection institution in cyberspace far exceeded that of in the realistic world,which largely saved the transaction cost of settling the domain name and trademark disputes,further reinforcing the expected return aforementioned.Third,the U.S.governance on trademarks in cyberspace had strengthened its policy-making power in cyberspace.The American dominated institution of settling domain name and trademarks had become the global norm,which provided an institutional assurance for the American capital to occupy global market promptly,strengthening U.S.hegemony on global internet governance.To fight against the U.S.hegemony,the international community had launched persistent struggle and achieved some accomplishments.But the study also shows that the traditional nation-states-dominated struggle was flawed in that it cannot well fit into governance demand of the networked society so that it was hard to make a substantive change to the status quo of global internet governance.The innovation of the study is that it adopts a cross-disciplinary perspective,conducting research on global internet governance from the micro issue of trademark,which can shed light to identify the U.S.approach to manipulate the internet governance.The deficiency of the study is that though it proposes the relationship between technological advance,institutional change and American digital economy growth,and has provided an explanation hereof,but a quantitative model has not been created to reveal the causal relationship between domain name technology,the trademark protection institution and American economic performance,which could be improved in the follow-up researches.