PNC Financial Services Group, a major American financial corporation, has failed in its bid to seize control of the domain names pnc.co.uk and pnc.uk. The Dispute Resolution Service of Nominet, the official registry for UK domain names, reviewed PNC’s complaint twice and dismissed it both times.
PNC’s primary claim was straightforward: the domains exactly match its corporate name and trademark. However, this argument crumbled upon examination of the historical record. British citizen Gordon Tees registered the pnc.co.uk domain back in 1996. He had been using the PNC acronym since 1992 as a co-founder of Premier Networks Consulting Limited. After selling his stake in that company, he established his own firm, Pretty Nice Chaps Limited – a playful name used specifically to preserve his rights to the PNC acronym and his domain.
Regarding the other domain, pnc.uk – direct registration of second-level .uk domains only became available to the public in 2014. When it did, registrants were given preferential rights to register matching second-level domains. Tees exercised this right as a .co.uk holder, securing pnc.uk that same August.
PNC’s UK subsidiary, by contrast, was not registered until 2010, and its UK trademark was not secured until 2021. Given this timeline, the Nominet panel determined the domains could not have been registered in bad faith to target PNC’s interests. Furthermore, there was no evidence of the domains’ use in bad faith. They pointed to the website for Tees’s IT consulting company, Pretty Nice Chaps Limited, which has no connection to PNC’s financial services.
As reported by Domain Name Wire, the initial panel found PNC’s complaint without merit and ruled that it constituted reverse domain name hijacking. PNC appealed the decision, but the appeal panel upheld the original verdict.
The outcome highlights a stark imbalance in resources – PNC manages over $720 billion in assets, while Pretty Nice Chaps is a modest IT consultancy. Yet, it is good to hear that sheer corporate scale and financial resources do not always prevail.
