India’s biggest public company tries to reverse hijack domain name

A WIPO panelist has found that Reliance Industries tried to reverse hijack jiolat.com — using the domain dispute system against a registrant whose name came first. The ruling is a reminder of what the UDRP can and cannot do, and of how much a dated paper trail is worth.

Reliance Industries, India's largest listed company by market capitalisation and revenue, filed a cybersquatting complaint over jiolat.com. Its communications arm Jio uses jio.com. The panelist refused transfer and went further, declaring that the complaint was brought in bad faith — a reverse domain name hijacking finding.

The reason sits in the chronology. The registrant's business has traded as Jiolot since before the Jio brand existed. The panelist held that the registrant had rights or legitimate interests in the name. Under the UDRP a complainant must prove three things: confusing similarity, no legitimate interest on the respondent's side, and bad-faith registration and use. Similarity alone gets a complainant nowhere, and here the second limb failed on the facts.

Two procedural details carried weight. Reliance had known of Jiolot since 2010, when it filed a trademark opposition against the business, and the complaint did not disclose that opposition or how it ended. The UDRP requires a complainant to certify that its filing is complete and accurate. The complaint was also filed twelve days after Reliance missed a deadline to file evidence in the trademark opposition — a sequence panels read as the dispute system being used as a second route after the first one stalled.

A reverse hijacking finding is a declaration, not a penalty. A UDRP panel's only real power is to order transfer or to refuse it; it does not award damages, and cost orders are rare. The registrant keeps the name. Anything beyond that — an action for a declaration, or a claim for costs — belongs in court, and there is no indication yet that either side is going there.

For anyone holding a name that resembles a large brand, the lesson is evidentiary. Resemblance is not the test. What decides these cases is dated proof of use before the brand existed: incorporation records, trademark filings, opposition papers, invoices, archived pages. A registrant who can produce that trail is in a different position from one who cannot, even when the names look close.

For brand owners the risk runs the other way. An aggressive filing that omits earlier proceedings can produce a published finding against the complainant, and that finding travels with the company and its representatives into later cases. Prior oppositions and their outcomes are not optional context; they are part of the record a panel expects to see.

What remains open: whether Reliance pursues the name through the courts, whether the registrant seeks costs, and whether the finding changes how the two businesses manage a coexistence that has run for more than a decade. The name itself stays where it is.