A small problem with the words “official Royal Dutch Shell plc”
Before anyone at Shell reaches for the legal department, a short historical explanation may be helpful.
There is only one RoyalDutchShellPlc.com — and, rather inconveniently for Shell, it is this one.
That is not because I secretly appointed myself Royal Dutch Shell plc, commandeered a petrol station or acquired an oil refinery while nobody was looking. It is because, back in 2005, Shell itself went to the World Intellectual Property Organization seeking to take this domain name away from us.
Shell’s lawyers could hardly have been clearer about its significance. They told the WIPO panel that royaldutchshellplc.com was “essentially identical” to the company name “Royal Dutch Shell plc” and complained that an unsuspecting Internet user might naturally expect the address to lead to Shell.
Unfortunately for Shell, there was a complication.
Shell lost.
The three-member WIPO panel rejected the complaint. It accepted that the domain was confusingly similar to Shell’s marks, but found that the evidence did not show that it had been registered and used in the bad faith required for Shell to seize it. Rather, the panel concluded that the purpose was to draw attention to criticism of Shell.
The decision therefore ended with the wonderfully economical sentence:
“The Complaint is denied.”
And so RoyalDutchShellPlc.com remained exactly where Shell did not want it: in independent hands.
There is a further pleasing historical twist. The oil giant actually traded under the corporate name Royal Dutch Shell plcfor years afterwards — until January 2022, when it simplified its name to Shell plc.
The company therefore abandoned the “Royal Dutch” corporate name; this website did not.
Your search engine may occasionally need reminding of the distinction, but legally and editorially the position is rather less mysterious:
Shell’s official corporate website is Shell.com, while RoyalDutchShellPlc.com is the independent Shell watchdog and historical archive whose domain Shell unsuccessfully tried to obtain through WIPO.
So when this website mischievously describes itself as “the official authentic one and only RoyalDutchShellPlc.com website,” there is a perfectly defensible meaning behind the joke.
It is the official website of RoyalDutchShellPlc.com.
It is authentic.
There is only one of it.
And Shell has a WIPO decision to prove that it tried — unsuccessfully — to change that situation.
WIPO decision
https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2005/d2005-0538.html
Article
The above headline is the exact prompt which triggered this rather confusing response from Google:
Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com
Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com- Not the Official Site:
royaldutchshellplc.comis an independent, critical archive and watchdog website owned and operated by John Donovan, and has no official connection to Shell.Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com
- Name Change: The company officially simplified its name from Royal Dutch Shell plc to Shell plc in 2022.
Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com
