Yeah, basically. I laid it out that it was my actual surname, and not only was the domain not going to be used in their industry, but wouldn’t be used commercially at all. At that point they backed down and basically said ok but if you try anything funny we’ll be back.

I did a lot of digging at the time and you actually can trademark a surname, kinda, but there are a lot of specific circumstances surrounding it that I could have also argued didn’t apply. Problem is, they know full well I couldn’t afford to fight them on it in court so if they really wanted it taken down they probably could have pushed me into it. The biggest factor was that the surname is incredibly rare and the average person would only associate it with their company, it would be a totally different case if they were “John Smith inc” which would be a lot harder to defend. Once they saw I was just a guy with the surname using it for personal websites though, the fact that they backed off was kinda cool since they probably could have pressed me way harder if they really wanted to.