Airy.com is a valuable 4 letter and one word .com domain name. A company filed a UDRP against Airy.com at the World Intellectual Property Organization. It is WIPO case D2020-1119.
Airy.com has an October of 2003 creation date, making the domain name nearly 17 years old. Airy.com is currently registered at Uniregistry, but the only part of the Whois record I can see is “Registrant State/Province: SINGAPORE.” The domain name had been registered under Whois privacy at Uniregistry for several years before.
When I visited Airy.com today, it forwarded to a website at AiryRooms.com. Crunchbase shows that this company is a hospitality company based in Jakarta, Indonesia that was founded in 2015. It is unclear when the current registrant acquired the domain name, and there are no public sales records for this domain name listed in NameBio.
The complainant in this UDRP is a company called AIRY GreenTech GmbH. A Google search shows that this company appears to use the Airy.Green domain name. A look at the LinkedIn profile for this company shows it had been using Airy.DE (which now forwards to the .Green website), and this company was founded in 2015.
Not only is airy a descriptive term and a valuable one word domain name, Airy.com is also valuable because it is a very short 4 letter acronym domain name. These factors alone should be enough for a domain registrant to prevail in a UDRP. In addition, because the domain name is being used by a company with the same name as the complainant, I don’t really see how the complainant will be able to prove the domain name was registered and is being used in bad faith. I will keep my eye on this UDRP and provide an update when I see the decision has been made.
Update: The panel ruled this was a case of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking.
These sort of UDRP’s are becoming a new normal. We need to have more reverse domain hijacking decisions and also some sort of penalty.
I don’t see only RDNH in decision making any difference to the complainants or the future complainants going through the previous cases for their reference.
Heavy penalty is needed to be imposed on complainants when the end result is RDNH. That’s the way nonsensical complaints will be lowered down.