ABSTRACT
The institutionalisation of domain name disputes has always struggled to strike a balance between its legitimisation and its political appropriation.1
Initial attempts demonstrate the efforts of numerous Internet entities to create a mechanism circumscribed to provide trademark owners with the necessary procedural tools to fight abusive domain name registrations, which threatened to invade their spaces of dominium and imperium. The privatisation of the naming and addressing system by the Clinton Administration produced opportunities for private bodies – like ICANN – to proceed to policy formulations thatmanifest the political influence these bodies possess on issues relating to theDNS. Through a series ofMemoranda ofUnderstanding (MoU), ICANN, alongside the trademark community, demonstrated the detrimental effects that domain names have on trademarks and modelled online trademark disputes around a hybrid and a-national administrative mechanism.
