Ask a small business owner what they own online and you'll get a confident list: the Instagram page with nine thousand followers, the Gmail address customers reply to, the Shopify store, maybe a YouTube channel. Ask a lawyer the same question and the list gets much shorter, much faster.
None of that is owned. It's licensed, under terms you agreed to without reading, from a company that can amend those terms or end the relationship at its own discretion. What's actually owned — in the narrow, tested, legally recognized sense — is close to one thing: the domain name. And even that comes with more conditions than people assume. If digital ownership needs to survive contact with a marketing team, has the operational side. If digital ownership needs to survive contact with a marketing team, XenGrowth's growth engineering practice has the operational side.
What does it mean for something online to be 'yours'?
The useful legal question isn't sentimental — it's about who has to justify what. If a platform revokes your account, do they owe you a reason, a process, or compensation? For almost every account you use, the answer is no, beyond what their own terms of service happen to promise, and platforms write those terms.
The clearest test case is Kremen v. Cohen. Gary Kremen registered sex.com in 1994 — a domain that would go on to become extraordinarily valuable. In the mid-1990s, Stephen Cohen, a convicted con artist, sent Network Solutions a forged letter claiming Kremen's company wanted to give up the domain. Network Solutions didn't verify it. They just handed the domain to Cohen, who built a profitable pornography business on it for years.
Kremen sued Cohen directly and won — a district court ordered the domain returned and awarded him $65 million, $40 million compensatory and $25 million punitive. But the more consequential ruling came when Kremen went after Network Solutions itself. The Ninth Circuit's 2003 opinion held that Kremen could sue the registrar for conversion — the legal term for wrongfully taking someone's property. That required the court to first decide that a domain name is property at all, capable of being possessed and stolen, not merely a slot in someone's database. It said yes. There is a longer treatment of the operations side of this in . There is a longer treatment of the operations side of this in The XenGrowth resource library.
No equivalent ruling exists for a Facebook page. Nobody has successfully argued in court that a suspended Instagram account is 'property' Meta converted when it disabled the account. The account is a license to use Meta's service, revocable per the terms you accepted, and that is a fundamentally weaker legal position than 'this is mine and you took it.'
How fast can a platform actually take something away?
Faster than most people plan for. On January 9, 2021, Amazon Web Services told Parler it would suspend the company's hosting, effective the night of January 10 — citing a pattern of content on the platform that violated AWS's Acceptable Use Policy against posts that 'encouraged and incited violence.' That's roughly a day's notice to an entire company's infrastructure. Parler sued, arguing its contract entitled it to 30 days, and thesuspension went ahead anyway, reported the same week by outlets from TechCrunch to Al Jazeera. Apple and Google had already pulled Parler's app from their stores days earlier.
Apple did something structurally similar to Epic Games seven months earlier, in a dispute over money rather than content moderation. When Epic added a direct payment option to Fortnite on August 13, 2020, defying App Store rules, Apple pulled the app the same day. Then, on August 17, Apple told Epic its entire Developer Program account — the credential behind every app Epic ships on iOS and Mac, not just Fortnite — would be terminated on August 28 unless Epic reversed course. That is the difference between losing one product and losing a company's entire distribution channel on a platform, over a single contract dispute, with about eleven days' notice.
Asset | What you actually hold | Who can end it, and how fast |
|---|---|---|
Domain name | A registration recognized as property (Kremen v. Cohen), renewable, transferable between registrars | Registrar can suspend for abuse or non-payment; a hijacker can forge a transfer request; you can lose it by simply not renewing |
Social media account | A revocable license under the platform's terms of service | Platform can disable it unilaterally, often with no phone support and no stated reason, as widely reported for Meta business accounts |
Cloud hosting account | A revocable service contract | Provider can suspend for a terms-of-service violation on roughly a day's notice, as AWS did to Parler in January 2021 |
App store developer account | A revocable license to distribute software on that platform | Platform can terminate the whole account over one product's rule violation, as Apple did to Epic Games in August 2020 |
Gmail / platform email address | A revocable license tied to an account the provider controls | Provider can lock the account for a security flag with no live human to appeal to, per years of user reports in Google's own support forums |
Question to ask | Domain name | Typical platform account |
|---|---|---|
Can you move it to a new provider on your own initiative? | Yes, with a transfer request and a 60-day waiting window in some cases | No — you can close the account, but not migrate the account itself elsewhere |
Does a court recognize it as property you can be robbed of? | Yes, per Kremen v. Cohen's conversion ruling | Not established — a suspended account is a breach-of-contract claim at best |
Who decides the rules that govern it? | ICANN policy, applied uniformly across registrars | The platform alone, via terms of service it can amend unilaterally |
What happens if you stop paying? | A defined grace period, then deletion — a known, published timeline | Immediate loss of access; most platforms publish no comparable grace period for account fees |
Isn't the domain itself just another rented thing?
Partly, yes, and it's worth being honest about that rather than overselling domain ownership as some kind of absolute deed. You don't own the .com namespace; Verisign operates the registry under contract with ICANN, and ICANN accredits the registrars who sell you registrations. What you hold is a registration recognized as property under the reasoning in Kremen v. Cohen, renewable on a schedule, subject to ICANN policy, and transferable — with friction — between registrars. works through AI agents and marketing automation in more operational detail. XenGrowth on AI agents and marketing automation works through AI agents and marketing automation in more operational detail.
That friction is real. ICANN's Transfer Policy locks a domain from moving to a new registrar for 60 days after initial registration, after any prior inter-registrar transfer, and after certain changes to the registrant's contact details — a rule designed to slow down hijackers, which also slows down you. ICANN approved eliminating this lock in late 2024, but implementation isn't expected before 2026, so it still applies today.
None of that erases the difference. A 60-day wait to switch registrars is friction on an asset you hold. A one-day suspension of an AWS account, or a disabled Instagram page with no appeals contact, is the asset simply not being yours to move at all.
There's a second, quieter condition worth naming: a registrar itself can still get the process wrong, the way Network Solutions did with sex.com, or the way a UK-based reseller and an Australian registrar called Melbourne IT got it wrong with panix.com in January 2005, when a forged transfer request moved a working ISP's domain out from under it in a single business day. Panix got the domain back within about two days, and ICANN called the episode one of the more serious policy breaches by an accredited registrar it had seen. Ownership recognized in law is not the same as ownership immune to a bad afternoon at your registrar's front desk.
Why does the domain sit at the center of everything else?
Because it's the one asset that can point anywhere. If your Shopify store gets suspended, your domain can point to a new store tomorrow. If your email provider locks your account, mail for your domain can be rerouted to a new provider once you regain access to your registrar. If your hosting is suspended the way Parler's was, a domain — held separately from the hosting account it happened to be pointed at — survives the suspension of everything downstream of it. For the AI search, GEO and discovery angle, see . For the AI search, GEO and discovery angle, see XenGrowth on AI search, GEO and discovery.
This is the practical reason the domain matters more than any account built on top of it: it's the address, not the building. Lose the building and you can rebuild elsewhere at the same address. Lose the address, and every account, every backlink, every business card pointing to it goes stale at once.
The domain is not special because it's more valuable than the accounts built on it. It's special because it's the only one of those things a court has ever agreed you can be robbed of.
What should you actually do with this distinction?
Register the domain under an entity you control — a business or your own name, not an employee's personal account or an agency's account on your behalf — and keep the registrant contact information current, since that is who has legal standing if anything goes wrong
Treat the domain and the hosting behind it as separable. Know, in advance, which provider you'd point DNS to if your current host suspended you tomorrow
Don't build the core of a business identity — the address customers repeat to each other — on a platform-issued handle. A domain redirects when a platform doesn't renew its goodwill toward you; a suspended account has no redirect
Read what your platform's terms of service actually say about termination before you depend on the account, not after. Most are written to require nothing of the provider beyond notice, and some — as Parler learned — don't even guarantee that in practice
Accept that domain ownership itself has real limits — the 60-day transfer lock, ICANN accreditation rules, a renewal habit — and plan around those limits rather than assuming the word 'owned' means unconditional
None of this is an argument against using social platforms, cloud hosts or app stores — you generally have to, and the reach they offer is real. It's an argument for knowing which parts of your presence are actually yours to move and which parts exist entirely at someone else's discretion, so the decision about where to depend on a platform is made deliberately rather than by default. The commercial version of this same argument — that infrastructure choices carry business risk, not just technical tradeoffs — is one returns to often.
The uncomfortable finish is that even the domain isn't fully yours in the way a house deed is yours — it's a lease you keep renewing from a system built on top of ICANN policy, with a registrar in the middle who can still make mistakes. It's just the least-rented thing you've got. Everything downstream of it is rented in full. For a longer treatment of why infrastructure decisions carry real commercial risk, see Infrastructure Cost Is a Business Problem.
Further reading from XenGrowth
Where this work meets go-to-market
Thinking about which parts of your online presence you actually control? publishes operator guides on building the revenue side of a business on infrastructure you don't lose overnight.
Further reading from XenGrowth
Where this work meets go-to-market
writes for the teams who have to run digital ownership day to day.
Further reading from XenGrowth
The XenGrowth resource library — what you'll learn: how the commercial side of this work is run, across search, automation and revenue operations.
XenGrowth on AI agents and marketing automation — what you'll learn: how the teams who own AI agents and marketing automation plan and measure it.
XenGrowth on AI search, GEO and discovery — what you'll learn: how the teams who own AI search, GEO and discovery plan and measure it.
Where this work meets go-to-market
the XenGrowth practice writes for the teams who have to run digital ownership day to day.
Five questions on which of your digital assets you truly own versus merely license. The distinctions are less obvious than they sound.
