A panelist with the National Arbitration Forum ruled in favor of Google Inc in the company’s dispute over the domain name googleplusone.com, a name that describes its new social product Google +1 which is trying to compete with Facebook’s “Like” button.
Google filed the complaint against Seshchand Atluri on May 2, 2011 and made three assertions: the domain was confusingly similar to Google’s mark, that the respondent had no rights or legitimate interests to the domain, and that it was registered in bad faith.
The National Arbitration Forum found that the registrant Seshchand Atluri, registered the disputed domain name on May 8, 2008 and that the domain name resolved to a parked website where profits were presumably being made.
Having established all three elements required under the ICANN Policy, the Panelist Ralph Yachnin concluded the domain name should be transferred to Google Inc.
The details of the case can be read here.