The Gong Show was a television talent show on ABC in the late 1970s. Contestants would perform a variety of acts while being judged by a panel of celebrity guests. If a judge found an act particularly bad, they could hit a large gong, abruptly ending the performance.
It’s too bad there isn’t a gigantic gong at the World Intellectual Property Organization! A UDRP was filed against Gong.com at WIPO. It is case #D2025-0500. Without doing much research, I think this UDRP should be a case of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH).
First and foremost, “gong” is a descriptive term. A gong is a large, flat, circular percussion instrument, typically made of metal, that produces a loud sound when struck with a mallet. That, alone, in my opinion, should be enough to doom this UDRP. However, there is more…
When the Whois privacy was removed from the domain name, it allowed people to see the registrant’s last name is Gong. A few moments of research at DomainTools showed me the domain name appears to have been registered to the same person as early as 2001. While this is the first Whois record at DomainTools, the domain name has been registered since 1997.
In addition to all of this, DomainLeads shows 161 exact match “Gong” TLDs registered, with 23 of them developed. More than 84,000 domain names have been registered with the term “gong” in them.
Breaking this down further, Gong is a descriptive term used in tens of thousands of domain names, and Gong.com appears to have been long-owned by someone with the Gong last name. Even though Gong.com doesn’t resolve to a website right now, I think this is an abusive UDRP filing.
Gong image courtesy of Dall-E.
Gong.com’s UDRP case screams Reverse Domain Name Hijacking. Trying to steal a premium domain they have no rights to—just another case of corporate overreach!