Kaplan.com, 1994: The Princeton Review Registered Its Rival's Name

The .com registry still dates kaplan.com to March 1, 1994. The record does not say who asked for the name. A Newsweek item published that September does: on March 1, the Princeton Review secured the address. The company was Kaplan's direct competitor in test preparation.

Neither side described this as an accident. John Katzman, the Princeton Review's president, told Newsweek that the move was "done entirely for fun and to irritate them." Jonathan Grayer, Kaplan's chief executive, called it "an act of corporate theft."

Seven months after the registration, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that a panel of arbitrators had ordered the Princeton Review to give up the name. The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, ICANN's general procedure for domain disputes, took effect five years later. The award and the court docket are not available to this article, so the outcome below comes from the sources that reported it.

Two companies were already in a legal fight

The two companies came from different eras. Kaplan traced its roots to a Brooklyn basement in 1938, and the Washington Post Co. acquired it in 1984. Katzman started with 19 students in the fall of 1981. The International Directory of Company Histories, published by Gale, says that the newer firm presented itself as the rebel and portrayed Kaplan as the establishment. The same history says that both firms sent spies to each other's classes.

The rivalry had a paper trail. Gale's entry on Kaplan says that the firms had by this period signed a 23-page agreement pledging not to misrepresent themselves or each other in advertising, with rules for resolving disputes. In March 1994, the month of the kaplan.com registration, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that the Princeton Review had filed suit in federal court over score claims in new Kaplan advertisements. The suit said that the campaign violated an agreement between the two companies. Katzman said that Kaplan "simply misleads the students." Grayer, then Kaplan's chief operating officer, said that his rival assumed customers were "unintelligent."

The record does not show which event came first in March. It also does not show that one caused the other. It shows two companies in legal conflict during the same month that one of them secured the other's name.

Kaplan had looked at the address and waited

The Princeton Review's own account gives the short version. Its company history says that it bought the name "before Kaplan had had a chance to register the name." Wired's October 1994 reporting complicates that sentence.

Greg Rorke, Kaplan's former president, told Wired that his staff met an internet services company around January and looked into registering kaplan.com. His explanation for what happened next was brief: "We figured there was no hurry." Rorke said that it came as a shock when someone in Kaplan's technology department found the registration a few months later.

Wired's Joshua Quittner wrote that no rules yet prohibited anyone from owning a corporate name. He added that the InterNIC, the agency assigning names, had neither the time nor the inclination to scrutinize applications. A 1997-98 Stanford student project says that domains were free at the time, so the word "buys" in the Princeton Review's history may be loose. The same project says that the company reserved review.com and princeton.com, then saw that Kaplan's domain was still available. The registry dates review.com to February 16, 1994, 13 days before kaplan.com. That order fits the Stanford account, although the record does not name a 1994 owner.

The address asked Kaplan's customers for complaints

This article found no copy of the original page. The Wayback Machine's earliest listed capture of the home page dates from November 1996, when the page already said "Welcome to Kaplan." The evidence for the 1994 page is secondhand.

The Daily Pennsylvanian quoted the most direct line: "We've heard a million stories about how bad Kaplan courses are," the address read. "Now we want to hear yours." Gale says that visitors were told immediately that they were at the Princeton Review, then asked to add to a list of negative comments. Reports even disagree on what the thing was. The Daily Pennsylvanian called it a newsgroup. In Wired, Katzman called it a site on the World Wide Web.

The Princeton Review's history says that Kaplan sued "within four days." Gale gives the same interval and measures it from the site's launch. No source reviewed for this article gives the launch date. Wired says that Kaplan sent a demand letter and then started legal action that reached the US District Court in Manhattan.

Katzman offered a joke and a legal position

Katzman gave two explanations. To Newsweek, he spoke of fun and irritation. To Wired, he gave a position: "Our position is that the name of the site is descriptive of what's on the site, which is an analysis of the different courses." Wired reported that he would hold the name unless the court told him otherwise, and that he would link to any other address that Kaplan found.

In October, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported a statement from him that used the words "in part": "We registered the name, in part, to irritate Kaplan."

Kaplan's side changed during the same months. Rorke appears in Wired as the former president, and Gale says that the company promoted the 29-year-old Grayer to president and CEO in June 1994. The company introduced Kaplan Online on America Online in August 1994. Gale says that it waited for the case to settle before launching a web site.

One disclosure belongs in the record. Newsweek's September item stated that Kaplan was owned by Newsweek's parent company, The Washington Post. Both Newsweek items cited here concern a sister company of the magazine.

The dispute moved into arbitration talks

The September Newsweek item is the earliest report found here of arbitration over the address. It said that the Princeton Review still owned the address and that the dispute had been added to arbitration talks over other claims. The parties hoped to resolve everything by year-end. The item put the disputed questions as trademark infringement and false advertising.

That sentence matters because later accounts split over how the case ended. The table sets them side by side.

The accounts become consistent with one reading. Kaplan took legal action, as Wired and the company history both say. Arbitrators then made the decision, as the two contemporary news reports say. On that reading, Harvard's note means that no court decided the dispute, not that nobody filed anything. That is this article's interpretation. The Hafke page gives a caption and number in the Southern District of New York, 94 Civ. 1604, but this article did not obtain that docket or the award. The panel's reasoning, its members, and the exact date of its decision remain unverified here.

The Daily Pennsylvanian reported an order and no award of money

The result had reached print by October 6, 1994. A San Jose Mercury News headline listed in Eric Goldman's bibliography carries that date, and this article read only the listing. The Daily Pennsylvanian's report of October 12 is the fullest account found here. It says that Kaplan claimed trademark infringement, that the arbitrators agreed, and that no money was awarded to Kaplan for legal fees or damages.

The same report carries the case of beer. Katzman said in a statement that he would have dropped the address for one, and he added that Kaplan had "no imagination, no sense of humor and no beer." The Stanford project later treated the beer as an actual offer that Kaplan declined. Douglas Welch, a Kaplan regional marketing director, did not find it amusing, the newspaper reported: "[Katzman] is a really flip dude." Welch added: "If they would have done that we wouldn't have had to bother with an arbitrator."

The reports are less clear on cost. Welch said that he did not know what Kaplan had spent. Gale later cited a reported $30,000 in legal fees. If the Daily Pennsylvanian's report of no award is right, Kaplan recovered none of that expense through the panel.

Reports in 1994 expected the ruling to guide later disputes

A Kaplan manager and Newsweek gave the ruling a large place. Welch said that it was the first legal decision on competitors' names online. Newsweek said that the ruling was expected to serve as a guideline in other disputes over the "poaching" of names, which were then being registered at more than 2,000 a month. Those statements record expectations in 1994. They do not establish that any later tribunal relied on the decision, and this article found no public text of the award.

The case did stay in circulation as an example. The Stanford project called it the best-known case of a company grabbing its competitor's domain. Harvard's 1999 course listed it next to Sprint's surrender of mci.com. Wired had placed it in the same article as Quittner's own registration of mcdonalds.com and the MTV dispute with Adam Curry.

Kaplan moved in within months

Kaplan used the address quickly. On February 8, 1995, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that "Kaplan on the Internet" had gone on line two weeks earlier, and it gave the address as http://www.kaplan.com. The Princeton Review offered its own services from review.com, the address that the Stanford account says it reserved first.

The rivalry also continued in arbitration. In March 1995, the same newspaper reported that an independent arbitration panel had ruled on the sampling methods behind test-prep score advertising. Grayer, by then president and CEO, said in a statement that the ruling supported what students had long known, and he said that the Princeton Review had been misleading them. The Princeton Review played the ruling down. Domains were one front in a longer argument between the companies.

A general procedure arrived five years later

The reported decision concerned one dispute between two companies. The general procedure came later. ICANN's UDRP took effect on October 24, 1999, and the US ACPA was enacted the same year. Our guide to cybersquatting and legitimate domaining explains both. Neither existed in 1994, and this article does not guess how such a case would have come out.

What survives is smaller than the legend. By Rorke's account, Kaplan looked at its own name around January and decided that it could wait. By Newsweek's account, its rival took the name on March 1. More than thirty years later, the registry still shows that date.

Sources and further reading

• Verisign RDAP — kaplan.com registry record, registration event 1994-03-01T05:00:00Z — fetched 2026-11-03
• Verisign RDAP — review.com registry record, registration event 1994-02-16T05:00:00Z — fetched 2026-11-03
• Barbara Kantrowitz, Newsweek — All In A Name, September 5, 1994 — fetched 2026-11-03
• Adam Rogers, Newsweek — Name Game, October 17, 1994 — fetched 2026-11-03
• Joshua Quittner, Wired — Billions Registered, October 1994 — fetched 2026-11-03
• Keith Huebsch, The Daily Pennsylvanian — Kaplan wins suit against Princeton Review, October 12, 1994 — fetched 2026-11-03
• Amy Lipman, The Daily Pennsylvanian — Test prep companies at legal odds, March 31, 1994 — fetched 2026-11-03
• Scott Mirelson, The Daily Pennsylvanian — Test prep companies go on line, February 8, 1995 — fetched 2026-11-03
• Jason Stover, The Daily Pennsylvanian — Ruling will change test firms' ads, March 16, 1995 — fetched 2026-11-03
• The Princeton Review — Company History Highlights, a company account, PDF entry for 1994. Supporting passage: "The case is settled in arbitration and The Princeton Review relinquishes the name to Kaplan." — fetched 2026-11-03
• International Directory of Company Histories (Gale), via Encyclopedia.com — Kaplan, Inc. — fetched 2026-11-03
• Ed Dinger, International Directory of Company Histories (Gale), via Encyclopedia.com — The Princeton Review, Inc. — fetched 2026-11-03
• Stanford CS181 student project — Domain Name Grabbing, 1997-98 — fetched 2026-11-03
• Harvard, Internet and Society 1999 — Readings for Week 2 — fetched 2026-11-03
• Michael Leventhal, WiredLaw — Who Can Stake a Claim in Cyberspace? — fetched 2026-11-03
• Eric Goldman — Internet Trademarks and Domain Name Legal Bibliography — fetched 2026-11-03
• James Hafke — Trademark Registration, Hafke Legal Services page — fetched 2026-11-03
• ICANN — Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy — fetched 2026-11-03
• Internet Archive — Earliest listed capture of kaplan.com, November 8, 1996 — fetched 2026-11-03