It seems that Google spend a lot of their time in court for one reason or other, whether they’re making the complaint, or defending their own actions. We’ve written before that they aggressively go after anyone who registers domain names that infringe on their trademarks, usually with a successful outcome. This means they have built up an impressive portfolio of typo domains in TLDs that span the entire globe.

However it looks like the California based corporation have recently taken a knock, missing out on recovering goggle.com in a UDRP, as the National Arbitration Forum have refused to consider the case.

To research the status of the domain currently, I typed it into my browser to see how it was being used. I didn’t get as far as the actual page, as my in-browser threat detector flagged a warning and advised me not to continue. When I opted to ignore the warning, I was taken to a page informing me that I had been “Selected from the Your City region to take part in our annual visitor survey”. Supposedly I can win a Macbook Air, an iPhone or an iPad. Although there is no attempt to make the page look like it is part of the Google brand, I can understand why Google wouldn’t be wild about the idea of someone entering a common typo and finding themselves at this page.

It seems Google losing their case was based upon a few key points. Firstly, goggle is a dictionary word with a definition that has nothing to do with Google. Interestingly though when I typed “define:goggle” into Google, it assumed I wanted to define Google, and auto corrected my “misspelling” and showed me results based on the correction!

In addition, when the domain name was previously owned by Knowledge Associates, they entered into a Co-Existence agreement with Google which meant they were able to operate the domain without fear of them taking legal action. Now that the domain’s ownership has transferred to a new owner it seems that the documentation detailing the agreement went with it, meaning the current registrant, David Csumrik, enjoys the same privilege.

The Panel therefor ruled that the case would not be considered, as they deemed the matter a contractual dispute between the two companies which falls outside of the UDRP Policy.

So despite the activities of goggle.com being less than reputable, it seems this doesn’t simply give Google the right to decide it would be better off in their hands. No doubt the registrant will continue to benefit from plenty of typo traffic… until Google decides to fight it out in Court!

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