Google loses out to Groovle in domain name battle

Google has lost in its battle to persuade the National Arbitration Forum that the domain name Groovle.com should be transferred to the search engine giant. It had been registered by 207 Media, which claimed that it had been used as a web site for two and a half years before Google complained.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body responsible for managing technical matters relating to the Internet’s domain name system, established a quick and cheap domain name dispute resolution arbitration service in 2000 for dealing with disputes over ‘.com’ domain names. The National Arbitration Forum is one of the bodies appointed by ICANN to hear the domain name disputes. To win a domain name from a registrant, the complainant must show that it has rights in a trade mark confusingly similar to the domain name, the domain name registrant had no rights in the name and registered and used it in bad faith.

In this particular case, Google failed to show that Google was confusingly similar to Groovle.  This is only the second time out of 65 domain name disputes that Google has lost.