How to recover a .ch domain after a failed buy-back negotiation

How to recover a .ch domain after a failed buy-back negotiation. UDRP and ccTLD domain recovery and defense across .ch. Email the firm to assess your case.

You offered to buy the .ch domain that carries your brand. The registrant came back with a price you cannot justify — or went silent. Now you need to recover it through a formal process rather than a check. The question is which process applies to Swiss country-code domains, and whether the facts of your situation support it.

Switzerland's .ch registry, SWITCH, administers its own dispute procedure — the SWITCH Dispute Resolution Procedure (SDRP) — that is separate from the UDRP used for gTLDs. To recover a .ch domain after a failed buy-back negotiation you must show rights in a name and that the registration constitutes an abusive, bad-faith use. A standard SDRP case typically concludes within a matter of months. The remedy, if you succeed, is transfer or deletion of the domain.

This page explains the SDRP process, the evidence that decides the outcome, how costs compare, and when a parallel or alternative strategy may be worth adding.

What governs .ch domain disputes – and why the UDRP does not apply directly

The UDRP is an ICANN-mandated procedure binding on registrars for gTLDs such as .com, .net, and .org. SWITCH, as the registry for .ch, operates under Swiss law and has its own rules. Those rules broadly track the UDRP in structure — a complainant must show trademark or name rights, bad-faith registration or use, and a connection between the disputed domain and those rights — but the precise test and procedure differ in important ways.

Critically, SWITCH is not bound by ICANN rules, and no WIPO or Forum filing covers a .ch domain. If a buy-back offer failed and the registrant is holding the .ch in obvious bad faith, you cannot simply file a standard UDRP complaint and expect a decision that reaches Switzerland. You need a proceeding under the SDRP, a Swiss court action, or a combination of both depending on what you want to achieve.

In our practice, brand owners sometimes arrive having already spent months in fruitless direct negotiation. They are surprised to learn that the buy-back demand itself — if it was disproportionate and aimed at the mark owner — can be powerful evidence of bad faith under the SDRP, directly parallel to the bad-faith circumstance described in Paragraph 4(b) of the UDRP.

For an assessment of your domain dispute, contact info@cognomenlaw.com.

How does the SWITCH SDRP test compare to the three UDRP elements?

The SDRP test requires the complainant to establish three things: rights in a name or mark; that the domain is confusingly similar to those rights; and that the domain was registered or is being used in bad faith or in a manner that violates the complainant's rights. The structure maps closely onto the three UDRP elements of Paragraph 4(a), but the SDRP reads the bad-faith limb as "registered or used" — not the UDRP's cumulative "registered and used." That distinction matters. A registrant who registered in apparent good faith but then turned opportunistic — demanding a ransom after learning about your brand — may still be vulnerable under the SDRP's disjunctive standard.

The right you rely on need not be a registered trademark. Swiss law recognizes name rights, trade-name rights, and personality rights as a basis for a complaint. That opens the procedure to brand owners whose protection is grounded in unregistered rights, company-name registrations, or long-standing commercial use rather than a registered mark. For complainants who do hold a registered trademark, the similarity analysis is straightforward: if the domain string is identical or confusingly similar to the mark, element one is met almost automatically.

What separates winning cases from losing ones is almost always the bad-faith evidence. A screenshotted demand for a five-figure price "to cover my investment," an email thread showing the registrant checked your brand's prominence before naming a price, or a parking page monetizing your brand's traffic — these are the facts that decide the case.

What evidence decides a .ch domain dispute after a failed buy-back?

The record you assemble before filing determines the outcome. Panelists and experts in national ccTLD procedures weigh the totality of the circumstances, but certain categories of evidence carry consistent weight.

• The negotiation transcript itself. Every email, every messaging-app exchange, every voicemail reference to a price should be preserved and produced. A demand that referenced your company's revenues, funding round, or market prominence is direct evidence the registrant knew of your rights when they set their price.
• Registration date relative to your rights. If your trademark or business name predates the domain registration, the registrant cannot plausibly claim they were unaware. The earlier your rights, the harder it is for the registrant to argue innocent coincidence.
• Use of the domain. A parking page, a pay-per-click landing page, or a redirect to a competitor's site all signal commercial exploitation. An entirely inactive domain — passive holding — is not automatically safe under the SDRP or under the UDRP consensus; panels regularly find bad faith from passive holding where the registrant has no credible legitimate use.
• Prior registration history. If the current registrant has a pattern of registering names corresponding to established brands, that pattern reinforces the inference of bad faith across the portfolio, not just for your domain.
• Any public statements or social-media posts where the registrant acknowledged the domain's commercial value in connection with your brand are directly admissible.

In a recent matter — a .ch brand domain, spring 2025 — we recovered a registration for a mid-sized European company after a two-year negotiation that had stalled at a six-figure demand. The registrant's own emails, in which they explicitly cited the client's trademark registration in justifying the price, anchored the bad-faith finding. No additional external evidence was needed. The lesson: document everything, and treat negotiation records as litigation material from day one.

What is the SWITCH SDRP process and how long does it take?

The SDRP is an administrative procedure run through SWITCH as the registry. Once a complaint is filed and found formally compliant, the registrant receives notice and a defined period — comparable in structure to the UDRP's 20-day response window — to file a response. A neutral expert is then appointed. The expert issues a decision; if transfer or deletion is ordered and no court challenge is filed within the applicable waiting period, SWITCH implements the remedy.

End-to-end, an uncontested case can resolve in roughly two to three months. A contested case — where the registrant files a substantive response — typically takes longer, depending on whether supplemental submissions are allowed. Unlike a UDRP proceeding at WIPO, there is no expedited track for the SDRP. However, if speed is the overriding concern, a Swiss court action for an interim injunction can freeze the domain's status while the administrative or court proceeding runs its course. We coordinate with local litigation counsel in Switzerland for any court-adjacent work.

One procedural point worth flagging: the SDRP does not preclude a court action. If the registrant files a court claim in Switzerland after an adverse SDRP decision, the court proceeding supersedes. Conversely, you may choose to proceed directly in court — particularly if you also want damages, which the SDRP, like the UDRP, cannot award. The SDRP remedy is limited to transfer or deletion; no monetary award is available in the administrative forum.

How do costs compare between the SDRP and a Swiss court action?

The official SWITCH filing fee for an SDRP complaint is a published figure, modest relative to full litigation costs; verify the current rate directly with SWITCH before filing, as registry-level fees are set by the registry and can change. Legal fees for preparing a well-evidenced complaint typically fall in a comparable range to UDRP complainant work — market rates for a straightforward single-domain case commonly run in the USD 3,000–7,000 range for legal fees alone, separate from the registry's official charge. Cases with complex ownership histories, multiple domains, or multilingual evidence require more preparation time and will sit toward the higher end of that range or above it.

A Swiss court action involves substantially higher legal costs. Swiss civil procedure carries filing fees scaled to the value in dispute, plus counsel fees in the Swiss market. For a domain with a market value in the tens of thousands of dollars, court proceedings often cost more in legal fees than the domain itself is worth — unless you are also seeking damages or an injunction that only a court can grant.

The decision between SDRP and court action is therefore principally a function of what you need. Transfer alone: start with the SDRP. Transfer plus damages, or a situation where the registrant is likely to litigate aggressively: factor in court costs from the outset and plan both tracks.

For context on the broader UDRP fee structure for gTLD disputes — relevant if the registrant also holds a .com or other gTLD version of your brand — WIPO charges USD 1,500 for a single-member panel on one to five domains. The Forum and CAC offer alternative filing options at comparable or lower rates. A coordinated multi-zone strategy covering both the .ch and any associated gTLD registrations is sometimes the most efficient path when the same registrant holds multiple infringing names.

To weigh UDRP against a court action for your case, email info@cognomenlaw.com.

What happens when the same registrant holds a .com and the .ch?

Multi-zone targeting — one registrant holding both the .com and the .ch version of your brand — is a fact pattern we encounter regularly. The two domains are governed by different procedures, and neither forum can reach the other zone's registration in a single filing. You must run separate proceedings: a UDRP complaint at WIPO, the Forum, or CAC for the .com; and a SDRP complaint at SWITCH for the .ch.

That said, the evidentiary record largely overlaps. The trademark evidence, the registration-date chronology, and the buy-back correspondence are all relevant in both proceedings. Filing strategy — which proceeding to commence first, whether to file simultaneously, and how to sequence evidence across the two records — affects both timelines and outcomes. A UDRP decision in your favor is not binding on the SDRP panel, but a well-written UDRP decision documenting the registrant's pattern of bad faith can be submitted as persuasive authority in the SDRP record, and vice versa.

In a recent engagement — a dual .com/.ch registration, autumn 2024 — we coordinated simultaneous UDRP and SDRP filings for a consumer-goods brand whose Swiss distributor had turned opportunistic at the end of its distribution agreement. Both proceedings resulted in transfer. The coordinated timeline meant neither domain was live and monetizing traffic during the dispute period.

The right route for a gTLD version of the same dispute follows a decision matrix. A .com or .net targeted at your brand: UDRP at WIPO for the fastest transfer at the lowest official cost. A new-gTLD variant that you want suspended urgently: the URS offers a quicker suspension remedy for the registration term, at a lower cost than a full UDRP, though it does not transfer ownership. A .de: German courts, not arbitration. And the .ch: the SDRP administered through SWITCH, with a court action available in parallel where needed.

Can the registrant claim legitimate interest in a .ch domain you tried to buy?

Yes — and this is the objection to prepare for before filing. Paragraph 4(c) of the UDRP identifies safe harbors for a respondent's legitimate interest: a bona fide offering of goods or services before notice of the dispute; being commonly known by the domain name; and legitimate noncommercial or fair use. The SDRP contains analogous grounds. A registrant who can show any of these will resist transfer.

The buy-back attempt itself can cut both ways. Filing a complaint after you tried to buy the domain creates a timeline question: did the registrant register before or after your trademark rights attached? If they registered first — even by a day — the bad-faith case becomes considerably harder, because the UDRP consensus (and the SDRP equivalent) requires that the domain was registered in bad faith at the moment of registration, not merely that the registrant became opportunistic later. This is one of the most common misconceptions about the procedure. A registrant who registered a domain legitimately can sell it at a profit; that is not cybersquatting.

The myth is that a high asking price alone proves bad faith. It does not. What matters is whether the registrant had your trademark in mind when they registered — and whether they have any independent claim to the name. If the domain corresponds to a generic term, a surname, or a geographic word the registrant can credibly associate with their own business, the case will be harder than it looks on first review. A pre-filing assessment — mapping your rights date, the registration date, the use history, and the registrant's other holdings — is the only way to know whether the case is strong before you spend money filing it.

What is the realistic next step after a failed buy-back?

After a negotiation fails, three actions determine whether you can recover the domain efficiently. First, preserve every communication from the negotiation — email, messaging apps, phone notes, and any document the registrant sent. Second, run a rights-date analysis: establish the earliest date on which your trademark, trade name, or business-name rights attached, and compare it with the domain's creation date in the SWITCH WHOIS/RDDS record. Third, review the domain's current use — screenshot the live site, the parking page or any redirect — and document passive holding if the domain is inactive.

Those three steps are the foundation of any complaint. They also tell you whether the case is winnable before you commit to filing costs. In our practice, we regularly advise brand owners who come to us after a failed negotiation: sometimes the facts strongly support a complaint; sometimes they reveal a timing gap or a legitimate-interest argument that means SDRP is unlikely to succeed, and a commercial purchase — even at a higher price — is the more rational path.

Where the SDRP case is strong, we assess the three elements, assemble the bad-faith evidence (including the buy-back correspondence), select the right expert body, and file the complaint. Where the registrant also holds a .com or other gTLD version of the same domain, we file the UDRP in parallel and coordinate the two evidentiary records. Where a court injunction is needed to freeze the domain's status during proceedings, we engage local litigation counsel in Switzerland.

Related at COGNOMEN

• UDRP domain recovery – full-service complainant work across WIPO, the Forum, and CAC
• How to recover a .nl typosquat – ccTLD disputes in the Dutch registry
• URS suspension for new gTLDs – the rapid option where transfer is not the goal