Royal Caribbean Cruises Files What Appears To Be, Shameful UDRP Proceeding

PALM BEACH – What do you do when another company possesses a sought after three-character domain name that you want, wish you had, or wish you would had thought to register for your business many, many years ago? You file a nonsensical UDRP proceeding of course – and shoot for the best.

That’s what appears Royal Caribbean Cruises has decided to do with the domain name “RCC.COM”, a relatively cool and extremely diluted acronym with a wide range of uses for companies throughout the world. This is a great example of what I would call a ‘nothing to loose’ attempt to steal a valuable domain name based on almost nothing.

Based on some initial research on industry news site, DomainInvesting.com, Royal Caribbean Cruises has little reason to file such a process referencing the term “RCC” rarely in their overall operations, branding  and advertising. This appears to be a clear abuse of the UDRP process and extremely wishful thinking on their part, which will likely just raise the price of the domain once they have lost, according to long time domain investor Rick Schwartz.

Also weighing in on this one is the opinion of widely respected Intellectual property attorney John Berryhill who seems to place this case, near dead on arrival.

This should be a fairly simple one to defend, given the history of the domain name and the apparent lack of any association between “RCC” and the complainant. I’ve seen “RCC” used more often for Roman Catholic Church. The base term here has a huge Wikipedia disambiguation page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCC

Here are 233 more reasons why WIPO Case Number D2019-1042 should be rejected and ruled as an attempt at Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH).

To see this list of Acronyms in its entirety including their territories of use, visit its source and full unedited list here: https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/RCC

All of the companies above likely refer to themselves as “RCC” at times if not frequently. Should they not all have an equal shot at this great domain name? Maybe in a perfect world, all of the companies above could share this fantastic domain name, or file an UDRP proceeding, but that is not how domain names work. They are first come, first serve, and they should never be stolen.

John Colascione

About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive of Internet Marketing Services Inc. He specializes in Website Monetization, authored a ‘how to’ book called ‘‘Mastering Your Website’, and is a key player in several Internet related businesses through his search engine strategy brand Searchen Networks®