FACTS ASSERTED BY THE COMPLAINANT AND NOT CONTESTED BY THE RESPONDENT:
The Complainant PepsiCo, Inc., together with Its consolidated subsidiaries (collectively, "PepsiCo"), is a leading global food and beverage company with brands that are respected household names throughout the world. PepsiCo owns numerous valuable trademarks essential to its worldwide businesses, including the flagship “PEPSI” brand, one of the world's most recognized consumer brands, which has been used for soft drinks since 1911 as a shortened version of the “PEPSI-COLA" mark that first denoted PepsiCo's soft drinks in 1898. PepsiCo relies on numerous domains comprised of the "PepsiCo," "Pepsi-Cola," and "Pepsi" strings, including <pepsi.com>, <pepsico.com>, <mypepsico.com>.
The string "idM" or "IDM" has a fairly well-understood meaning in the context of security and identity management. Identity management is generally a process of establishing confidence in user identities that are electronically presented to an information system as part of access (authorization) control, such as Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication processes.
The Complainant contends that both disputed domain names <myidmpepsico.com> and <myidmmypepsico.com> are probably algorithmically-generated typosquats based on traffic to PepsiCo's <idmt.mypepsico.com> domain name used by PepsiCo in connection with its identity management (idM).
The disputed domain names are being used for websites displaying sponsored listings related to PepsiCo, idM and PepsiCo's primary beverage competitor, the Coca-Cola Company. The Complainant contends that both disputed domain names were registered and are being used to exploit typographical errors and misdirect those seeking authorized access to PepsiCo's corporate website to commercial advertisements related to identity management, PepsiCo, and its competitor.
After initiating these dispute resolution proceedings, the Complainant’s representatives contacted the Respondent by e-mail, offering to terminate the proceedings if the Respondent transferred the disputed domain names. The Respondent replied to this e-mail and offered to transfer the disputed domain names against payment of (quote) “our out of pocket expenses of USD 145/- per domain”. The Complainant did not acept this offer.
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