It pressed forward with its case rather than buying the domain for out-of-pocket costs.

Insurance giant AXA has lost another cybersquatting case over the domain axa.org.

The company lost a dispute in 2018, which was filed against Advocates Across America, a group that advocated for people with learning disabilities. That organization, which had been dissolved, didn’t respond to the dispute. But, given its name, the panelist found that the domain was not registered in bad faith.

In 2019, a new registrant acquired the domain name. VV Reddi, who resides in India, registered the domain for what he said was the American Experience Association. That fits under the umbrella of his Customer Experience Association, which uses the domain cxa.org.

The insurance company argued this was all a ruse.

Humourously, its counsel appears to struggle with how people choose acronyms. In the 2018 dispute, it argued that AXA couldn’t be used to represent Advocates Across America because X doesn’t stand for “across,” ignoring the common use of X for “across”.

In the new case, it argued X couldn’t stand for experience, even though that’s a common usage in user experience-related terms.

Nevertheless, panelist Andrew Christie agreed with the insurance company regarding Reddi’s explanation for the domain’s use, calling it artificial. However, he still sided with the respondent on the question of bad faith:

However, the fact that the Respondent most likely confected a reason for registration and for use of the disputed domain name is not necessarily the same thing as the Respondent having registered and used the disputed domain name in bad faith. The disputed domain name has an inherent value due to the fact that it is comprised of only three characters. While it is true that those three characters are also the Complainant’s trademark, that is not the only semantic value of the three characters. The Respondent’s assertion those three characters are a given name of Arabic and Hebrew origin, and a word in Kurmanji Kurdish, appear to be valid. Furthermore, while not common, there are words in English that begin with the letter “x”. Thus, the three characters “axa” can operate as an acronym, thereby providing an additional semantic value to the character string.

For these reasons, this is not a case in which there is no conceivable good faith use to which the disputed domain name could be put. Accordingly, the Panel does not accept the Complainant’s assertion that the only plausible conclusion is that the Respondent intentionally targeted the Complainant’s well-known trademark when acquiring the disputed domain name…

The insurance company must be kicking itself now because it could have acquired the domain name for the respondent’s out-of-pocket costs. Both before and after the case was filed, Reddi offered to transfer the domain to the insurance company for his out-of-pocket costs, which were about $1,600. It declined.

It even argued that this offer was evidence of bad faith:

The Respondent has expressed a willingness to consider transferring the disputed domain name in exchange for reimbursement of its costs, which may indicate an intention to derive financial benefit from the disputed domain name.

What financial benefit would that be?

Plasseraud IP Avocats in France represented the insurance company. Ankur Raheja of Cylaw Solutions represented the registrant.