Michelin took my domain. They were right, and I still think the process is broken.

Last November I registered michelinkeyhotels.com and built something I'd wanted as a traveler: a directory of every hotel recognized by the Michelin Key program, paired with aggregated Google review scores, so you could see the inspector's view and the everyday traveler's view side by side. Inspector stays are short and anonymous. They don't always surface the things real travelers ask about, like booking friction or consistency over time. I thought the pairing was useful. I still do.

In May, Michelin filed a WIPO domain dispute against me. I found out when the case notification arrived. There was no email before that, no call, no “please transfer the domain and we're done.” A company with a century-old brand and a law firm on retainer went from zero to formal proceedings against one person running a side project, as its opening move.

I represented myself, and I lost. The decision is public (WIPO Case D2026-2051) with my full name in it, permanently. The panel found that putting MICHELIN in my domain created confusion about affiliation, and it was right. That's the part I want to be clear about, because this is not a story about being wronged on the law. Their trademark, their call. I transferred everything, moved the project to finehotelsguide.com, added a disclaimer making the site's independence explicit, and stripped out the affiliate boilerplate my site template carried. About that boilerplate: my footer said some links might earn a commission. The links never earned anything meaningful, but the sentence existed, the Wayback Machine remembers it, and the panel used it to reject my claim that the site was noncommercial. Fair enough. If you're going to say your project is noncommercial, your own footer has to agree with you.

So Michelin won, correctly, under the rules. Here is what I think the rules get wrong.

First, there is no step before the hammer. UDRP filings cost thousands and take months. An email costs nothing and takes a day. I would have handed over the domain for the asking; I know this because when the decision came, I complied within hours. The system gave a global company no reason to try asking, so it didn't.

Second, the process publishes your name forever but gives you no appeal. A single arbitrator decides, and unless you're prepared to file a federal lawsuit, that's the end. For a company this is Tuesday. For an individual it means one panel's characterization of your motives is the permanent public record of the matter, written without ever speaking to you.

Third, the asymmetry does the deterring, not the law. Nothing I built with the data itself was unlawful. Which hotels hold a Michelin Key is a fact, and facts belong to everyone; review sites report Michelin stars every day. But when your counterparty can spend more on filing fees than your project will earn in its lifetime, you learn that being legally defensible and being practically defensible are different things.

If you're building something adjacent to a big brand, learn from my mistakes, which were real: never put someone's trademark in your domain, no matter how descriptive it feels. Delete template affiliate disclosures if you aren't actually monetizing, because they will be read as commercial intent. And know that the Wayback Machine is the discovery process now; your site's history testifies whether you invite it to or not.

The project lives on at finehotelsguide.com, independent and clearly labeled as such. I don't think I harmed Michelin, and I'd say that to them directly if they ever wanted the conversation they skipped the first time. That, really, is the whole complaint: not that they enforced their trademark, but that between a company and a person, the first tool out of the drawer was a tribunal instead of an email.