I don't think the user 'owns' it at all. I mean, it's pretty obvious that you're just laying claim to some set of bits in somebody else's system. I'm not confused about that :)

I just don't quite see how a username is 'owed' to other people who would use it more, either.

The twitter namespace is property of Twitter alone. It's cute that there are those who think the "owners" of these names would be each user.

Well, OK, but a certain level of assured "ownership" is beneficial to everybody. Twitter handles, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, etc., would not be very useful if Twitter, ISP, postal service, telcos, etc. frequently exercised the right to deny access to previous users at any time.

Seeing how easily GoDaddy handed over the domain, it seems one can't even own a domain properly, and that is supposed to be a lot closer to an "ownership" right than Twitter handles.

I really don't understand why people still use goDaddy. i wouldn't recommend it to my arch-ennemy

The difference between some of those and twitter's namespace is that Twitter is not a public utility. It is a privately operated company with a defacto monopoly on short status updates (micro blogging).

We could look towards email and dns, though, as examples of a more fair distribution of namespace resources.

Organizations would do well to investigate what their options are to retain control over their namespace, lest it fall whim to a mishap such as this instance.