On Tuesday the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued an order for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to seize Iran’s internet domain (.ir) and IP addresses in order to recover more than $1 billion in damages that the Islamic Republic owes for its sponsorship of global terror.
The Times of Israel reports on the action taken in response to the lawsuit brought by Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Center, on behalf of a group of terror victims and their survivors:
The United State District Court decided that the .ir domain name, along with Iran’s IP addresses — without which Iranian websites cannot be included in the World Wide Web — were assets that could be seized to satisfy judgments against the Islamic state of more than a billion dollars, owed by Iran to Israeli and US victims of terror perpetrated by the Hamas and Hezbollah organizations, among others.
As a result, Shurat Hadin, representing those victims, could collect the fees Iran pays to keep its Internet going — or force an auction of Iran’s Internet assets to satisfy the judgment.
ICANN has 10 days to respond to the order. ICANN will likely argue that legally Iran’s internet properties cannot be seized. After that, the plaintiffs will have ten days to respond with a counterclaim.
An intellectual property lawyer interviewed by the New York Post called the legal strategy “very creative and very aggressive.” While it is uncertain that the strategy will succeed in the ICANN case, other efforts to recover damages from Iran have succeeded. Last year a federal court seized a skyscraper belonging to Iran. It was the largest terror related forfeiture. Subsequently, a court ruled that proceeds from the sale of that building could be used to pay damages to families of terror victims.
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