Imagine waking up and finding that your country’s online identity-its .uk or .fr-wasn’t run by a trusted national registry anymore, but by an armed militia. That is our reality in Yemen.
Since the Houthis took Sana’a in 2014, they have held not only the capital, but also the keys to Yemen’s digital space. The state telecom TeleYemen, which runs both the main ISP (YemenNet) and the .YE domain, fell into their hands. Overnight, the online identity of an entire country was captured.
Today, every .gov.ye, .edu.ye, and .net.ye is effectively under militia control. Ministries of the internationally recognized government are forced to operate on awkward domains like mofa-ye.org, while the Houthis occupy the official state address at mofa.gov.ye.
And the worst part? ICANN and IANA know this. They have been aware for years, yet nothing has changed.
A Domain Forged into a Weapon
This is no longer theoretical. The hijacked .YE domain is an active weapon used to build a digital ghost state.
The Houthis established a website at hocc.gov.ye, posing as a “Humanitarian Operations Coordination Center.” From this official-looking government domain, they issue military directives, manage “sanctions lists” for international shipping, and state that vessels violating their “ban” will be subject to “military targeting.”
It’s a digital extortion racket with a .gov.ye address.
The infrastructure is also primed for cyber warfare. We found twitter.com.ye configured with live mail servers pointing to Houthi-controlled infrastructure-a purpose-built phishing machine waiting to impersonate a global platform.
This isn’t just about websites. It’s about the weaponization of trust.
The Human Cost of Digital Capture
This digital control has lethal consequences on the ground.
The same captured institutions running .gov.ye domains oversee Yemen’s health sector. In 2022, dozens of children with leukemia died in a Sana’a hospital after being given expired drugs. The tragedy was traced directly to a supply chain overseen by these Houthi-run agencies.
In Yemen, we have grown accustomed to crises being managed behind closed doors. Even international organizations stayed silent for years about their own kidnapped staff. This very lack of transparency is what has enabled the militia. To speak, to write, even to celebrate Yemen’s National Day is a risk. Yet ICANN still treats .YE as business as usual.
A Decade of Failure: Why Nothing Changed
Why has a problem this obvious been ignored for ten years? Because the system meant to fix it is broken.
Yemen’s crisis has been defined by a failed model: a disconnected government-in-exile and an advocacy industry often focused on funding cycles, not tangible results. When leaders left the country and continued to collect salaries abroad, accountability collapsed.
This system of failure is why a straightforward problem like the hijacked .YE domain has been ignored since 2015. Defending Yemen’s digital sovereignty was sidelined in favor of a model focused on securing salaries and grants, not on achieving tangible results.
ICANN’s Choice: Complicity
If militias can capture a ccTLD and the world shrugs, it tells every armed group: take the city, and you get the domain too.
ICANN has acted before: it redelegated Somalia’s .SO during state collapse. So why is .YE left untouched?
Their official response to our formal request gives the answer: they see it as a “local issue” of “equity, justice, [and] honesty.” They are using bureaucratic procedure to avoid moral responsibility. But inaction is a precedent too. It means legitimizing digital state capture.
What We Demand
#FreeDotYE is a direct rejection of this failed model. We are volunteers, not a project seeking funding. Our work is for our home, for our generation, and for the future of a free internet in Yemen and beyond.
We are not asking ICANN to pick sides in Yemen’s war. We are asking it to uphold its own rules, based on Jon Postel’s RFC 1591: a ccTLD manager must be a trustee for the entire national community.
Our demands are clear:
- Review .YE now under the ccNSO Framework of Interpretation.
- Follow the established path for an absent manager: “Revocation followed by Delegation.”
- Place .YE under a neutral, time-limited trustee to serve all Yemenis until a legitimate government can assume control.
Join Us
- Read our full correspondence with IANA: freethedotye.org/correspondence
- Sign and circulate the petition: change.org/FreeTheDotYE
- Pressure ICANN, rights groups, and technical communities to acknowledge the hijacking of .YE.
Final Word
For us Yemenis, this is not abstract. Our voices are censored, our colleagues are kidnapped, our flag is banned. Even our country’s domain has been stolen.
The question is not just whether Yemen gets its name back. The question is whether the internet’s rules mean anything when the guns are louder.