Trademark letter, not a DMCA — which registrars have actually held the line?

Everything written about registrars on this board is about DMCA and copyright. That is not the pressure I am asking about.

A trademark complaint is a different mechanism with a different escalation path and a different set of people applying it. It does not go to abuse@. It goes to the registrar's legal contact, from a firm that bills by the hour and will follow up, and the ask is not "remove a file" — it is the name itself.

I want reports, not policies. Who has actually received one of these on your behalf, and what did they do? Forwarded it and waited, forwarded it and suspended, or told the sender to go away? Dates would help.

Which TLD? That's most of the answer and you've left it out.

Fair hit. Two .com and one .io.

Then the honest answer is that your registrar choice matters much less than this thread is going to assume, and I'd rather say that than sell you something.

Under a gTLD you are inside UDRP whether you like it or not. A complainant who files and wins does not need your registrar's cooperation — the decision binds the registrar as a condition of its accreditation, and if the registrar refuses it loses the accreditation, which is its entire business. There is no offshore registrar for .com. There is no jurisdiction shopping. The contract is the same contract everywhere.

What your registrar choice does buy you is real but narrower:

• Whether the pre-UDRP letter gets forwarded to you or actioned unilaterally. This varies enormously and is worth choosing on.
• Whether your identity is on the WHOIS record for the lawyer to write to directly, which changes whether you get a letter at all.
• Whether the registrar volunteers your details on request rather than on order.

Njalla is the strongest on the middle two because they are the registrant of record and you are not, so the complainant's letter arrives at a Swedish company rather than at your kitchen table. 1984 is conventional ownership with Icelandic privacy law behind it, which is a different trade — you keep control, you keep more exposure.

But if a UDRP panel decides against you on the .com, both of those companies transfer the name and both are right to.

This is the correct answer and it took the board about eleven years to start saying it out loud. I watched people pay a premium for "bulletproof registrars" from about 2013 onwards on the assumption it bought UDRP immunity. It never did. Nobody selling it ever said it did either, which is the clever part.

How many UDRP filings have you actually seen land on a name at a privacy registrar? I'm not disputing the mechanism, I'm asking whether it happens often enough to plan around.

Two personally, both on .com, both lost by the registrant, both transferred inside about eight weeks of filing. Small sample and self-selecting because I only hear about the ones people tell me about.

What I'd add is that the filings are rare and the letters are not. Most of this never reaches a panel because the letter alone gets the name dropped, which is exactly what the letter is for.

The .io in your list is worth separating out because ccTLDs are not covered by UDRP as a class — each registry sets its own dispute policy, and they range from a near-copy of UDRP to essentially nothing.

That's the actual lever available to you and it isn't the registrar at all, it's the extension. Choosing a ccTLD whose registry has a weak or non-existent dispute process does more for you than any registrar could, and it's free at registration time. The trade is that a small registry can also be arbitrary in the other direction with no appeal, and a handful have simply deleted names on a phone call from someone local.

On the registrars themselves, ranked by what actually varies:

Registrar	Who is registrant	Forwards or actions	Notes
Njalla	Njalla	Forwards to you	Hardest to transfer out, by design
1984	You	Forwards	Iceland, conventional ownership
OrangeWebsite	You	Forwards	Similar posture, older brand
Virtualine	You	Unknown to me	No reports either way on record

"Unknown to me" is not a criticism, it's the state of the evidence, and I'd rather leave the cell honest than fill it.

I have never had a trademark complaint reach any name I hold, so all of the above is mechanism rather than experience.

Short version: pick the extension for the dispute policy and the registrar for whether they tell you before they act.

The extension point is the one I came away with. I'd been treating the TLD as a branding decision and the registrar as the security decision, and it's the other way round.

One practical thing. Whatever you choose, have the name somewhere else already registered and DNS ready. If letter come and you must move in one day, is not the time to shop.

And keep the zone file in version control somewhere that isn't the registrar. Recreating thirty records by hand under time pressure is how people lose mail for a week on top of everything else.

The ccTLD advice cuts both ways and the thread has half-buried it. A registry with no dispute policy also has no process protecting you, and at least two of the popular ones have deleted names because someone rang up. Trading a slow formal process for a fast informal one isn't obviously a win.