It's not true of gTLDs though. You actually own those domains, and they can't be taken away from you (barring extreme circumstances) so long as you pay the registration fees every year. But domains on ccTLDs can be taken away from you by the government at any time for any reason.
I gotta say i find it extremely hard to believe that one can "own" a domain. This sounds like hand-waving. We don't own software, we barely own computers (to do with what we want), we don't own media.
Is this like "one can own land" but really that's asterisked with Eminent Domain (no pun intended)?
Real estate is a pretty good analogy for this, actually. You own domains on gTLDs in the same way that you can own property, but you have to pay your annual property taxes (domain registration fees) else you can lose it. But owning a domain on a ccTLD is more like renting property in a jurisdiction that doesn't have rent control; at any point the actual owner can simply say you're not allowed to use it anymore, and tough luck. Look at what happened to British .eu registrants, for example.
Also you can own all sorts of intangible things, so it's really not that foreign of a concept. You can own parts of the RF spectrum in your country, or mineral rights to a specific piece of land, or you can own a piece of intellectual property or a patent. Domain names are just another flavor of intangible property ownership.
