Web hosts pulled sites over unverified trademark claims

Losing a website you have built and operated for years is painful enough. Losing it because a competitor filed a trademark complaint that nobody bothered to verify first is something else entirely. That is the situation Kenneth Gaughan, a Maryland man, now finds himself navigating through the courts after both InMotion hosting and DreamHost canceled his hosting accounts late last year following complaints submitted by a rival operating a similar domain.

Gaughan had been running ESApet.org since 2019, a website focused on emotional support animals. The complaints came from Elevate Rank LLC, the company behind ESApet.com, which holds a figurative trademark for the ESApet name.

Critically, however, that trademark includes a disclaimer acknowledging that ESApet itself is descriptive rather than distinctive, which raises immediate questions about how much weight a complaint based on that mark should actually carry.

The timeline surrounding Elevate Rank’s trademark adds further complications. The company’s trademark filing cites a first use date of 2017, yet according to Gaughan’s lawsuit, Elevate Rank did not actually form until 2021. There was indeed a website at ESApet.com around 2017, but it featured a different logo entirely, and the domain subsequently expired and ended up listed for sale through HugeDomains before Elevate Rank apparently picked it back up. None of that history appears to have factored into how the web hosts handled the complaint.

What sits at the heart of this case, beyond the specific dispute between two competing websites, is a much broader question about how hosting providers handle trademark claims. Copyright complaints fall under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides web hosts with a clear legal framework and safe harbor protections for responding to takedown requests.

Trademark law offers no equivalent structure. Trademark owners who believe someone is infringing their rights have two established paths available: the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy for cybersquatting cases, and the courts for infringement claims. Neither path involves asking a hosting provider to simply pull a site based on a complaint letter.

The irony Gaughan highlights in his lawsuit is hard to miss. InMotion Hosting has since told him it will not restore his site without a court order or trademark cancellation notice. Yet the company apparently needed neither before taking the site down in the first place.

That inconsistency is precisely what makes this case worth watching closely.