There was another three letter .com domain name that recently became the subject of a UDRP proceeding: NTI.com. Because the NTI.com UDRP was filed at the Czech Arbitration Court (CAC), I didn’t even realize the UDRP had been filed until I read the decision on UDRPSearch.com.
The owner of NTI.com was represented by domain industry attorney John Berryhill. The complainant is a company called NTI CADcenter A/S, which operates on the similar but inferior NTI.dk domain name. .DK is the ccTLD extension for Denmark.
I think the most important aspect of the UDRP decision can be found here:
“The Panel is comfortable to state that, three-letter marks have, in general, low distinctiveness (NB: the few exceptions that exist are confirming the rule). What is more, “NTI” can be found on the web to mean many different things in world commerce. The fact, mentioned by the Respondent, that a plethora of other domain names exist for “NTI” (nti.org, nti.net, nti.nl, nti.ch, etc.) reinforces this opinion of the Panel.”
There have been a slew of UDRP filings involving valuable three letter .com domain names in the last year or so. The most recent filing was against PCO.com, a UDRP that is still pending. I count ten UDRP filings that resulted in victories for the domain name owners in the last 12 months or so, including the following UDRP proceedings: TNP.com, JDM.com, CQC.com, ATC.com, SOG.com, ICP.com, MEZ.com, Hug.com, GWG.com, and ALO.com. As far as I can recall, there were just two 3 letter .com UDRP filings that went in favor of the complainants, but both were alleged to involve stolen domain names that were returned to their rightful owners: LDW.com and EDP.com.
It seems that the UDRP panelists are making the right decision when it comes to these valuable LLL.com domain names. It is unfortunate that domain owners need to spend thousands of dollars to defend their right to own them, but at least I haven’t noticed any egregious decisions with these names lately.
