By John Donovan

Article disclaimer: This article contains a mixture of fact, opinion, criticism, recollection and satire. Site wide disclaimer also applies.

Long before the current artificial-intelligence muddle over the Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain name, long before search engines and chatbots started confusing Shell’s official corporate identity with this independently owned Shell criticism website, there was a much older and much more serious mess.

It was not created by a bot.

It was created by Shell.

Shell, previously known as Forthdeal Limited, subsequently as Royal Dutch Shell plc, and now hiding in plain sight as Shell plc after ditching the disgraced Royal Dutch moniker, has reportedly marched back into the same reputational swamp it has spent decades pretending does not exist.

The latest confusion over the domain name royaldutchshellplc.com is not an isolated technical hiccup. It is the long tail of Shell’s own conduct: the reserves scandal, the attempted corporate clean-up, the attempted seizure of our domain names, and the company’s chronic inability to deal honestly with criticism when the critic happens to possess a paper trail.

That paper trail did not appear by magic. It was built warning by warning, letter by letter, lawsuit by lawsuit, settlement by settlement, leak by leak, and document by document.

No one has issued as many warnings about the ethics of Shell management as we did. Those warnings were ignored. Had Shell taken them seriously, the reserves fraud might never have happened.

SHELL’S OWN WIPO COMPLAINT BLEW THE COVER

In 2005, Shell International Petroleum Company Limited filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization seeking to seize three domain names:

royaldutchshellplc.com
royaldutchshellgroup.com
tellshell.org

Shell lost.

That fact alone is important. But what is even more revealing is what Shell itself placed before WIPO.

In its own 44-page complaint, Shell admitted that in the 1990s three lawsuits were brought against Shell UK Limited by me or companies associated with me, alleging wrongful use of intellectual property. Shell admitted those cases were settled.

Shell then referred to the fourth action: the Smart litigation. That case concerned Shell’s Smart promotion, involving smart-card technology for customer loyalty points, which I alleged had been derived from ideas Shell had obtained from me.

Shell’s position to WIPO was predictably dismissive. It claimed the evidence showed the Smart claim was without foundation. Yet Shell also admitted that the case was settled after three weeks of trial.

Then came the carefully crafted wording.

Shell told WIPO that no payment was made “in relation to the claim itself,” although it admitted that, for reasons it said were not relevant to the WIPO complaint, a contribution was made to my legal expenses.

That statement deserves scrutiny.

There was a confidential financial settlement. I received a secret payment. Shell may wish to dress it up in legal costume jewellery and call it something else, but money changed hands as part of the settlement machinery. The full terms were not aired in open court.

This matters because Shell relied in its WIPO complaint on comments made by Mr Justice Laddie in the Smart litigation. Those comments were made before the judge had been told the full terms of settlement. In other words, Shell later paraded judicial comments to WIPO while omitting the more awkward context: the settlement terms were not fully before the judge when he made those remarks.

That is not a small detail. It goes to the heart of Shell’s method. Selective disclosure. Aggressive framing. Corporate polish applied over inconvenient facts.

Readers can make up their own minds whether that reflects the “honesty, integrity and openness” Shell so often claims to cherish.

THE GREAT DOMAIN NAME LAND GRAB

Shell’s 2005 WIPO complaint was dressed up as a trademark dispute. In reality, it was an attempted corporate land grab against an elderly critic who had moved faster than Shell’s own lumbering bureaucracy.

The timing was delicious.

Shell announced plans to unify the old Royal Dutch/Shell structure under a new single parent company to be called Royal Dutch Shell plc. We registered the obvious domain. Shell had not secured it in time.

Cue corporate panic.

Shell argued that the domain names were identical or confusingly similar to names associated with the group. It complained that visitors looking for Shell might find adverse publicity and critical commentary instead. It even alleged that the registration prevented Shell from using the names itself.

But Shell had a problem. A rather large one.

Its own complaint admitted that our websites had not attempted to pass themselves off as official Shell websites. Shell also acknowledged that our sites consisted largely of media reports about the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and our comments on them, predominantly negative. It conceded that Shell had long been aware of the sites and had previously taken the view that we were entitled to express our opinions on the internet.

That admission was fatal to the corporate victim act.

The WIPO panel denied Shell’s complaint. The domains stayed with Alfred Donovan. Shell’s attempted seizure failed.

So when today’s bots, search engines and automated summaries stumble into the Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain-name confusion, they are not encountering some fly-by-night cybersquatting relic. They are encountering the survivor of a public legal battle Shell chose to start and lost.

THE RESERVES FRAUD CONNECTION

The domain-name fiasco cannot sensibly be separated from the reserves fraud.

The reserves scandal was the great rupture in Shell’s carefully polished image. In 2004, Shell was forced to admit that it had overstated its proved hydrocarbon reserves by billions of barrels. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission imposed a $120 million penalty. The UK Financial Services Authority imposed a £17 million penalty for market abuse.

Three top executives departed. Shell’s reputation, once lacquered in pious claims about integrity and responsibility, was shattered.

But the culture that produced the reserves scandal did not materialise overnight.

We had warned for years that Shell’s senior management culture was infected by deception, cover-up and ruthless conduct. We warned investors. We warned Shell. We warned the Dutch royal household. We warned anyone prepared to listen.

Most did not.

The result was not merely a financial scandal. It was the exposure of a mindset.

Shell had become used to managing reality by controlling language, suppressing critics, settling awkward disputes behind closed doors, and presenting only the version of events useful to Shell. The reserves scandal was simply the largest and most public expression of that same corporate disease.

The present domain-name mess is another symptom. Different technology, same arrogance.

THE WARNING THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN HEEDED

In 1999, Alfred Donovan warned Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands that there appeared to be “a culture of deception and cover-up deeply ingrained at the highest levels of Shell.”

That was not a throwaway insult. It was a warning based on years of direct experience with Shell litigation, Shell threats, Shell settlements, Shell undercover activity and Shell’s relentless attempts to crush a much smaller opponent.

By 2004, after the reserves scandal erupted, that warning looked less like the complaint of a disgruntled shareholder and more like an early diagnostic report.

The headlines that followed Shell’s reserves revelations spoke of lies, cover-ups, fat cats, deception and executives sick and tired of lying. Those were not words invented by this website. They appeared in mainstream press coverage because Shell had finally been caught by regulators doing on a grand scale what we had been warning about for years.

And yet Shell still learned the wrong lesson.

Instead of asking why its critics had been so right, Shell tried to silence, discredit or outmanoeuvre them. The WIPO complaint over our domain names was part of that pattern.

Shell did not merely fail to buy the obvious domain names. It failed to understand why those domain names had become valuable in the first place.

They became valuable because Shell’s own conduct made them valuable.

THE JUDGE, THE SETTLEMENT AND THE HALF-TOLD STORY

The Smart litigation remains central because Shell used it as part of its narrative against us.

Shell pointed WIPO to judicial comments made in that litigation. Those comments were damaging when read in isolation. But they were made before the full settlement terms were disclosed to the judge.

That is the point Shell would rather disappear.

The judge did not know the whole story. He did not know the full settlement terms. He did not know about the secret payment I received. Yet Shell later relied on his comments as though they represented the full and final moral verdict on the dispute.

That is how Shell operates: amplify what helps, bury what hurts.

If Shell truly believed the Smart claim was worthless, readers may wonder why the case was settled after three weeks of trial. If no meaningful settlement existed, readers may wonder why money changed hands. If the full terms were irrelevant, readers may wonder why they were not placed plainly before the court and later before the public.

The answer, in my view, is simple. Shell wanted the benefit of settlement without the embarrassment of appearing to have settled.

FROM COURTROOM TO CHATBOT

The current domain-name confusion is almost comic in its absurdity.

Royal Dutch Shell plc no longer exists under that name. Shell officially changed its name to Shell plc in January 2022. Yet the domain royaldutchshellplc.com remains active as an independent Shell criticism website, because Shell failed to secure it, tried to seize it, lost, and then spent years pretending the problem had gone away.

Now automated systems trip over the wreckage.

A chatbot sees “Royal Dutch Shell Plc” and a live domain. It tries to reconcile old corporate names, current corporate names, historical criticism, archived litigation and Shell’s rebranding. The result is a mess.

But the mess did not begin with artificial intelligence. It began with corporate artificial honesty.

Shell’s own history has become so tangled that even machines struggle to summarise it cleanly. That is not the fault of the machines alone. It is the fault of a company that spent decades generating contradictory records, confidential settlements, public denials, legal aggression and reputational camouflage.

The bots are not hallucinating from thin air. They are feeding on the sediment Shell left behind.

SPOOF SHELL PR/SPIN SECTION

Shell Corporate Reputation Comfort Unit — Unofficial Emergency Statement

Shell would like to reassure stakeholders that any confusion regarding the domain name royaldutchshellplc.com is entirely the fault of the internet, history, critics, algorithms, possibly the weather, and certainly not Shell.

While it is true that Shell once attempted to seize the domain through WIPO and lost, stakeholders are encouraged not to focus on that unfortunate detail. Shell remains committed to transparency, provided transparency is routed through approved channels, reviewed by Legal, softened by Corporate Affairs, and stripped of anything that might cause reputational indigestion.

Regarding prior settlements with Mr Donovan and associated companies, Shell notes that the word “settlement” can mean many things, and the movement of money should not be interpreted as money moving unless such interpretation has been cleared by Shell’s preferred version of events.

Regarding the reserves scandal, Shell believes the matter is historic, regrettable, behind us, and best discussed only in terms sufficiently vague to avoid reminding anyone that regulators imposed enormous penalties over the overstatement of proved reserves.

Regarding the domain-name confusion, Shell’s position is clear: Royal Dutch Shell plc became Shell plc, except when legacy branding, old filings, archived litigation, criticism websites, bots, search engines and corporate ghosts say otherwise.

Shell thanks the public for its understanding and asks everyone to please use shell.com, where reality is more carefully curated.

SPOOF BOT-REACTION/COMMENT SECTION

Bot 1: “Royal Dutch Shell plc is Shell plc, except when it is a historical entity, except when the website says otherwise, except when the critic owns the domain. Confidence: dangerously high.”

Bot 2: “I have located Shell’s official website. Unfortunately, I have also located Shell’s unofficial memory. This appears to be the problem.”

Bot 3: “WIPO denied Shell’s complaint in 2005. Would Shell like to appeal to the Court of Algorithmic Forgetfulness?”

Bot 4: “Corporate rebrand detected. Historical accountability not deleted.”

Bot 5: “Shell attempted to bury the domain issue. Search engines indexed the shovel.”

Human commenter: “So Shell ignored the warnings, got engulfed by the reserves scandal, failed to secure the obvious domain, lost the WIPO case, dropped ‘Royal Dutch,’ and now bots are confused? Sounds less like a glitch and more like a 25-year invoice.”

Sir Henri’s ghost: “Splendid. A company once built on oil now slips on its own archive.”

CONCLUSION

The present Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain-name fiasco is not a random internet oddity. It is the latest chapter in a very long story.

Shell ignored warnings about ethics. Shell settled cases while trying to control the narrative. Shell became engulfed in the reserves scandal. Shell tried to seize criticism domains and failed. Shell later abandoned the Royal Dutch name. Now, in 2026, the corporate ghost continues to haunt search engines, chatbots and Shell’s reputation.

The lesson is brutally simple.

If Shell had listened when the warnings were first issued, there might have been no reserves fraud scandal, no desperate WIPO complaint, no domain-name humiliation, and no present mess for artificial intelligence to untangle.

But Shell did what Shell so often does.

It ignored the warning light until the dashboard caught fire.

^*This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan - more information here. There is also a Wikipedia segment, the Shell DPA Files, "Shell and the Spies", the Shell Leaks files, as well as books written and published by John Donovan - Kindle eBooks. Timeline of the Donovan Shell Feud. Toxic History of Royal Dutch Shell Group. Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record — 550+ Articles, 110 Books, 40 Years. ^*All created and supported by internet wizz, Nick Gill.