uBID, Inc. v. GoDaddy Group, Inc.

In the

United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit

No. 09-3927

U BID, INC .,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.

T HE G O D ADDY G ROUP, INC., et al.,
Defendants-Appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 1:09-cv-02123—Charles P. Kocoras, Judge.

A RGUED M AY 19, 2010—D ECIDED S EPTEMBER 29, 2010

Before F LAUM, M ANION, and H AMILTON, Circuit Judges.
H AMILTON, Circuit Judge. Plaintiff uBID, Inc. is a
Chicago-based company that auctions the excess inven-
tory of manufacturers and retailers over the Internet. It
brought suit in Illinois against The GoDaddy Group, Inc.,
which operates the well-known domain name registra-
tion site GoDaddy.com. In its complaint, uBID alleged
that GoDaddy violated the Anti-Cybersquatting Con-
sumer Protection Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125(d), by inten-
2 No. 09-3927

tionally registering domain names that are confusingly
similar to uBID’s trademarks and domain names for the
purpose of profiting from uBID’s marks and exploiting
web surfers’ confusion by selling advertising for those
confusingly similar websites. The district court dismissed
the case for lack of personal jurisdiction, holding that
GoDaddy, which is headquartered in Arizona, lacked
sufficient contacts with Illinois to be sued there. See uBID,
Inc. v. GoDaddy Group, Inc., 673 F. Supp. 2d 621 (N.D. Ill.
2009). We reverse. We conclude that due process is not
violated when a defendant is called to account for the
alleged consequences of its deliberate exploitation of the
market in the forum state.

Factual and Procedural Background
At this early stage in the litigation, and without the
benefit of an evidentiary hearing, the plaintiff bears only
the burden of making a prima facie case for personal
jurisdiction. We take the plaintiff’s asserted facts as true
and resolve any factual disputes in its favor. See Tamburo
v. Dworkin, 601 F.3d 693, 700 (7th Cir. 2010); Purdue
Research Foundation v. Sanofi-Synthelabo, S.A., 338 F.3d
773, 782 (7th Cir. 2003). Our review of the district court’s
legal analysis is de novo. State of Illinois v. Hemi Group
LLC, ___ F.3d ___, ___, 2010 WL 3547647, at *2 (7th Cir.
Sept. 14, 2010).
GoDaddy, which has offered registration services
since 2000, has tried to restrict its physical presence to
Arizona. Its computer servers, which handle most of the
No. 09-3927 3

work of registering and maintaining the domains that
GoDaddy’s customers buy, are all located in Arizona.
GoDaddy is incorporated and headquartered in Arizona,
and the vast majority of its offices and employees are
located in Arizona.
While GoDaddy has taken pains to limit its physical
presence to Arizona, its virtual presence in the rest of
the country cannot be ignored. GoDaddy has imprinted
itself on the national consumer consciousness with
a series of television advertisements featuring the
“GoDaddy Girls”—celebrities who invite viewers to
register a domain name at a low price. In recent years
these ads have aired throughout the country with great
frequency, including during the last six Super Bowl
broadcasts. The company’s advertising extends well
beyond television. Potential customers who might step
away from the television during GoDaddy’s ads can
still see the company’s logo stamped on driver Danica
Patrick’s race car and golfer Anna Rawson’s hat. In
Illinois, GoDaddy has put up billboards in the home
ballparks of the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, and fans
who attend Chicago Bulls or Blackhawks games or races
at the Chicagoland Speedway have been treated to
GoDaddy ads as well.
This nationwide advertising campaign has paid divi-
dends for GoDaddy from the Illinois market. In 2008, the
company counted its Illinois customers in the hundreds
of thousands, and those customers delivered many mil-
lions of dollars in revenue to GoDaddy that year.
(GoDaddy asked that the exact numbers be kept con-
fidential. The orders of magnitude are sufficient for our
4 No. 09-3927

purposes.) There is no evidence that GoDaddy’s business
in Illinois has fallen off since then.
GoDaddy’s customers, including those in Illinois, buy
a variety of services. Some buy domain names and
build websites under those domain names. Others buy
domain names and do nothing with them, but allow
GoDaddy and its partner, Google, to place ads on the
websites (known as “parked pages”) and to collect fees
when visitors click on the ads. Still others buy domain
names and pay GoDaddy a further fee, which allows
the buyers themselves to take a share of the ad revenues
from their parked pages (known as “cash parking”).
According to uBID’s complaint, some of GoDaddy’s
customers engage in a form of cybersquatting. They
allegedly buy and park their domain names not to
build websites there in the future, but rather to profit
merely by owning them. These GoDaddy customers
register domain names that are confusingly similar to
existing domain names, and they hope either to sell
the similar domain to the original site’s owner for a
premium or to generate fees from wayward web surfers
who click on a link to their site and then click on ads,
leading the advertisers to pay GoDaddy, Google, and
the GoDaddy customer. According to uBID’s allegations,
GoDaddy also wants confused consumers to click on its
customers’ parked pages, instead of uBID’s website,
because more clicks on the confusingly-named parked
pages mean more revenue for GoDaddy, too. Complaint
¶¶ 2, 20-25.
In its complaint, uBID alleges that this practice has
harmed the value of its trademarks, which include
No. 09-3927 5

UBID and UBID.COM. The complaint points to dozens
of domain names registered with GoDaddy that
may be confusingly similar to its marks, such as
ubid4homes.com, ubidr.com, and ubidauctionsale.com.
Regarding the merits of its claim under the federal anti-
cybersquatting law, GoDaddy intends in bad faith, uBID
alleges, to profit from the confusion of people who visit
such sites. Complaint ¶¶ 20-25. Although most of the
customers who registered offending sites on uBID’s list
appear to be located outside of Illinois, two gave
Illinois addresses.
GoDaddy responded to uBID’s suit with a Rule 12(b)(2)
motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction.
The district court granted GoDaddy’s motion. The court
rejected uBID’s argument that GoDaddy was subject
to both general and specific personal jurisdiction in
Illinois. Defining GoDaddy’s contacts with Illinois to
include only the two Illinois-registered domain names
listed in uBID’s complaint, the court held that those
contacts were “created at the initiative of Illinois resi-
dents” and could not be attributed to GoDaddy. More-
over, the court held, because GoDaddy enters into thou-
sands of contracts with thousands of customers across
the country, GoDaddy “should not reasonably expect”
to be subject to personal jurisdiction in each of those
customers’ states.

Analysis
In this federal question case where federal statutes
do not authorize nationwide service of process, a
6 No. 09-3927

federal court in Illinois may exercise personal jurisdiction
over GoDaddy if it would be permitted to do so under
the Illinois long-arm statute. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(k)(1)(A).
A state’s exercise of personal jurisdiction is also subject
to the demands of the Fourteenth Amendment’s due
process clause. Because Illinois permits personal juris-
diction if it would be authorized by either the Illinois
Constitution or the United States Constitution, the state
statutory and federal constitutional requirements merge.
See State of Illinois v. Hemi Group LLC, ___ F.3d at ___, 2010
WL 3547647, at *2; Tamburo v. Dworkin, 601 F.3d 693, 700
(7th Cir. 2010), citing 735 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/2-209(c).
Personal jurisdiction can be either general or specific,
depending on the extent of the defendant’s contacts
with the forum state. If the defendant’s contacts are so
extensive that it is subject to general personal jurisdic-
tion, then it can be sued in the forum state for any cause
of action arising in any place. More limited contacts
may subject the defendant only to specific personal juris-
diction, in which case the plaintiff must show that its
claims against the defendant arise out of the defendant’s
constitutionally sufficient contacts with the state. In
either case, the ultimate constitutional standard is
whether the defendant had “certain minimum contacts
with [the forum] such that the maintenance of the suit
does not offend ‘traditional notions of fair play and
substantial justice.’” International Shoe Co. v. Washington,
326 U.S. 310, 316 (1945), quoting Milliken v. Meyer, 311
U.S. 457, 463 (1940). In uBID’s estimation, GoDaddy
should be subject to either general or specific jurisdiction
in Illinois. We conclude that GoDaddy is not subject to
No. 09-3927 7

general jurisdiction in Illinois, but it is subject to specific
jurisdiction in this suit.

I. General Jurisdiction
A defendant is subject to general jurisdiction when it
has “continuous and systematic general business con-
tacts” with the forum state. See Helicopteros Nacionales
de Colombia, S.A. v. Hall, 466 U.S. 408, 415-16 (1984). This
is a demanding standard that requires the defendant
to have such extensive contacts with the state that it can
be treated as present in the state for essentially all pur-
poses. See Tamburo, 601 F.3d at 701; Purdue Research, 338
F.3d at 787. The standard for general jurisdiction is de-
manding because the consequences can be severe: if a
defendant is subject to general jurisdiction in a state,
then it may be called into court there to answer for any
alleged wrong, committed in any place, no matter how
unrelated to the defendant’s contacts with the forum.
See id.
GoDaddy’s contacts with Illinois do not satisfy this
standard. Although its contacts are extensive and deliber-
ate, they are limited to the marketing and sale of registra-
tions for Internet domain names, as well as contracts
with many Illinois customers and the hosting of websites
accessible from Illinois. It would be unfair to require
GoDaddy to answer in Illinois for any conceivable
claim that any conceivable plaintiff might have against
it. See Tamburo, 601 F.3d at 701 (maintenance of public
website is not sufficient, without more, to establish
general jurisdiction). Imagine an Illinois visitor to
8 No. 09-3927

GoDaddy’s headquarters in Arizona who slipped, fell, and
then sued for the injury, or a GoDaddy employee who
worked in Arizona, was fired, moved to Illinois, and then
sued for wrongful termination. There is no reason for
GoDaddy to expect, as it goes about its business of
selling domain names in Illinois, that it is thereby
exposing itself to such lawsuits in Illinois. The district
court correctly found that GoDaddy is not subject to
general jurisdiction in Illinois.

II. Specific Jurisdiction
Though insufficient to support personal jurisdiction
for all claims, a defendant’s contacts with a state will
often support jurisdiction for a claim that is sufficiently
related to the defendant’s activities in the state. The
ultimate constitutional standard for the exercise of
specific jurisdiction has been the same since the Supreme
Court first abandoned strict territorial jurisdiction: is it
fair and reasonable to call the defendant into the state’s
courts to answer the plaintiff’s claim? See International
Shoe, 326 U.S. at 317 (the demands of due process “may
be met by such contacts of the corporation with the state
of the forum as make it reasonable, in the context
of our federal system of government, to require the corpo-
ration to defend the particular suit which is brought
there”); accord, Burger King Corp. v. Rudzewicz, 471 U.S.
462, 474 (1985); World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson,
444 U.S. 286, 297 (1980). The due process clause will not
permit jurisdiction to be based on contacts with the
forum that are random, fortuitous, or attenuated. Burger
King, 471 U.S. at 475.
No. 09-3927 9

In applying this broad standard, the Supreme Court
has found that the contacts supporting specific jurisdic-
tion can take many different forms. See, e.g., International
Shoe, 326 U.S. at 314-15 (defendant employed salesmen
or agents in the forum state and shipped physical mer-
chandise to forum state buyers); Burger King, 471 U.S. at
474-75 (defendant did not physically enter the forum
but “purposefully avail[ed]” itself of the benefit and
protection of the forum state’s laws by entering into long-
term business franchise contract with resident of forum);
Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783, 789-90 (1984) (individual
defendants committed an intentional tort outside the
forum state but expressly aimed their misconduct at the
forum state).

A. Defendant’s Contacts with Illinois
Because of GoDaddy’s extensive marketing in Illinois
and sales to Illinois customers, including two who alleg-
edly cyber-squatted on domain names similar to uBID’s,
the Supreme Court’s analysis of specific jurisdiction
in Keeton v. Hustler Magazine, Inc., 465 U.S. 770 (1984), is
most instructive here. In that case, a New York resident
filed a libel suit in New Hampshire against Hustler Maga-
zine, a resident of Ohio and California. The magazine
had no employees or offices in New Hampshire and
did not expressly aim its publication or conduct at New
Hampshire in particular. There was no evidence of any
marketing targeted specifically at New Hampshire resi-
dents, and the magazine’s sales in New Hampshire made
up only a tiny part of its total sales. Yet the Supreme
Court found that the magazine could be called to New
10 No. 09-3927

Hampshire to answer the libel suit because it circulated
10,000 to 15,000 copies of its magazine to subscribers
in New Hampshire each month. See id. at 773-74.
As in every personal jurisdiction case since Inter-
national Shoe, the outcome in Keeton turned on whether
the relationship between the plaintiff’s claim and the
defendant’s contacts with the state made it fair to call
the defendant into court there. The Supreme Court
found that the magazine had “continuously and deliber-
ately exploited the New Hampshire market” by regularly
circulating its magazine to New Hampshire residents.
Id. at 781. The plaintiff’s claim for libel arose “out of the
very activity” the magazine was conducting in the state,
a close enough relationship that it was reasonable to
expect the magazine to answer the plaintiff’s suit in that
state. Id. at 779-80. Because the magazine produced “a
national publication aimed at a nationwide audience,”
there was “no unfairness in calling it to answer for
the contents of that publication wherever a substantial
number of copies are regularly sold and distributed.” Id.
at 781.
The same reasoning applies here. GoDaddy has thor-
oughly, deliberately, and successfully exploited the
Illinois market. Its attempt to portray itself either as a
local Arizona outfit or as a mindless collection of servers
is unconvincing. This is a company that, like the national
magazine in Keeton, has conducted extensive national
advertising and made significant national sales. GoDaddy
has aired many television advertisements on national
networks, including six straight years of Super Bowl ads.
It has engaged in extensive venue advertising and
No. 09-3927 11

celebrity and sports sponsorships. All of this marketing
has successfully reached Illinois consumers, who have
flocked to GoDaddy by the hundreds of thousands and
have sent many millions of dollars to the company each
year. These contacts establish GoDaddy’s minimum
contacts with the state for claims sufficiently related to
those contacts.1
GoDaddy seeks to distance itself from Illinois by
casting the Illinois market as simply one among many, a
place of no particular interest to it. Although its ads can
be seen on Illinois television sets and computer screens

1
Because GoDaddy’s actual contacts with Illinois meet the
constitutional standard for minimum contacts under Keeton,
we need not decide whether sufficient contacts should be
imputed under the Calder “express aiming” test announced by
the Supreme Court on the same day as Keeton. Our concurring
colleague finds that Calder provides the more useful guidance
here, but it may be that our colleague’s proposed analysis
under Calder would produce an even more expansive test for
personal jurisdiction in cases alleging intentional torts. Calder
can be read as authorizing personal jurisdiction in the home
state of the victim of almost any alleged intentional tort, but it
need not and should not be read quite so broadly. As we
explained in Tamburo, two cases in this circuit—Wallace v.
Herron, 778 F.2d 391, 394-95 (7th Cir. 1985), and Janmark, Inc. v.
Reidy, 132 F.3d 1200, 1202-03 (7th Cir. 1997)—are in some
tension with respect to the scope of the “express aiming” test
from Calder. See Tamburo, 601 F.3d at 704-06 & n.8. Tamburo,
Wallace, and Indianapolis Colts, Inc. v. Metropolitan Baltimore
Football Ltd. P’ship, 34 F.3d 410, 411-12 (7th Cir. 1994), are
consistent in requiring “something more” beyond injury in
the forum state from an alleged intentional tort.
12 No. 09-3927

and at Illinois sports venues, GoDaddy contends that
these are only parts of a national advertising campaign
and that it does not target its advertising toward Illinois
residents in particular. Likewise, GoDaddy argues that
its sales in Illinois are merely “the unilateral activity of
Illinois residents” entered into “at the initiative of the
customers,” and processed automatically by GoDaddy’s
servers in Arizona. These characterizations of GoDaddy’s
contacts with Illinois are inaccurate.
It is true that there is no evidence that GoDaddy specifi-
cally targets Illinois customers in its advertising. The
same could have been said of the defendant in Keeton v.
Hustler Magazine, and those arguments did not prevail.
Instead, what mattered was that the magazine had pur-
posefully directed its business activities toward New
Hampshire just as it had toward all other states. See 465
U.S. at 774 (describing district court’s findings). Consistent
with the reasoning of Keeton, it is easy to infer that
GoDaddy’s national marketing campaign is intended
to reach as large an audience as possible, including the
13 million potential customers in the nation’s fifth
most populous state. In fact, we need not infer: there is
evidence in this case that GoDaddy (or its agent) has
placed physical ads in particular Illinois venues. The
evidence shows that this marketing campaign has
already created substantial business for GoDaddy in
Illinois. There was no such evidence in the cases GoDaddy
cites. See, e.g., Singletary v. B.R.X., Inc., 828 F.2d 1135, 1136-
37 (5th Cir. 1987) (no evidence of the frequency of ad-
vertising or the amount of business defendant gained in
the state; only one unrelated sale in the forum state), cited
in Web.com, Inc. v. The GoDaddy Group, Inc., No. 1:06-cv-
No. 09-3927 13

1461 (N.D. Ga. Aug. 3, 2007); Hy Cite Corp. v.
Badbusinessbureau.com, LLC, 297 F. Supp. 2d 1154, 1164
(W.D. Wis. 2004) (defendant did not advertise for its
site within forum state and plaintiff did not show what
benefit defendant took from advertising in that state);
High Maintenance Bitch, LLC v. Uptown Dog Club, Inc., 2007
WL 3046265, at *3 (W.D. Wash. Oct. 17, 2007) (single sale
in forum state).
No more persuasive is GoDaddy’s argument that its
sales to Illinois residents are automated transactions
unilaterally initiated by those residents. GoDaddy tells
us that its customers enter into most transactions with-
out any human action on GoDaddy’s end. But of course
the customers who buy domain names from GoDaddy
are not simply typing their credit card numbers into a
web form and hoping they get something in return.
GoDaddy itself set the system up this way. It cannot
now point to its hundreds of thousands of customers
in Illinois and tell us, “It was all their idea.” See State of
Illinois v. Hemi Group, ___ F.3d at ___, 2010 WL 3547647,
at *4 (misleading to describe internet sales as “unilateral”
on part of customers where seller took significant steps
both before and after sales). GoDaddy is aware that it
earns many millions of dollars annually from Illinois
customers, and it cannot be unhappy to have had such
success in the state. Its contacts cannot fairly be de-
scribed as random, fortuitous, or attenuated.2

2
All contracts between GoDaddy and its customers include a
standard forum-selection clause requiring disputes between
(continued...)
14 No. 09-3927

Nor should GoDaddy’s unusual business model com-
plicate an otherwise straightforward case for sufficient
minimum contacts. As Keeton v. Hustler shows, a
typical business that operates on a national scale with
GoDaddy’s sales in Illinois, GoDaddy’s customer base
in Illinois, and GoDaddy’s blanket of advertising in
Illinois would unquestionably be subject to personal
jurisdiction there for claims arising from its business
activities that reach into the state. It would be rea-
sonable for such a company to expect to be sued there.
GoDaddy’s way of doing business allows it to avoid
the type of physical presence that makes these questions
easier when dealing with non-Internet companies that
operate on a similar scale. But the fact that GoDaddy
can make millions of dollars and recruit hundreds of
thousands of customers without the equivalent of Inter-
national Shoe’s sales representatives, Ford’s dealerships,
or Coca-Cola’s distributors is not decisive under the
flexible jurisdictional analysis that the Supreme Court
has applied consistently. What matters is that GoDaddy
purposefully availed itself of the Illinois market for

2
(...continued)
GoDaddy and the customer to be litigated in Arizona. The
forum-selection clauses are not relevant to this case. They
may be a reasonable way for GoDaddy to protect itself from
being called into court by a customer in the customer’s home
state. GoDaddy’s alleged misconduct toward a third party,
however, has nothing to do with the jurisdictional expecta-
tions the company has fostered with those customers who
read all the details of the form contract.
No. 09-3927 15

its services through its deliberate and continuous ex-
ploitation of that market.

B. The Relationship Between Defendant’s Contacts and
Plaintiff’s Claim
Mere minimum contacts, however, are not sufficient
to establish specific personal jurisdiction. As the Supreme
Court has emphasized, it is essential not only that the
defendant have minimum contacts with the forum state
but also that the plaintiff’s claim against the defendant
“arise out of or relate to” those contacts. Burger King, 471
U.S. at 472-73, quoting Helicopteros Nacionales, 466 U.S. at
414; Tamburo, 601 F.3d at 708. GoDaddy argues that all
of its contacts with Illinois are irrelevant to the constitu-
tional analysis because they are unrelated to uBID’s
lawsuit. This argument fails because it misunderstands
the reason why due process requires that the claim and
the contacts be related.
On this relationship, our opinion in RAR, Inc. v. Turner
Diesel, Ltd., 107 F.3d 1272 (7th Cir. 1997), is instructive.
“We cannot simply aggregate all of a defendant’s con-
tacts with a state—no matter how dissimilar in terms
of geography, time, or substance—as evidence of the
constitutionally-required minimum contacts.” 107 F.3d
at 1277. To do so would mean that people and companies
would have to conduct interstate business without the
confidence that “transactions in one context will not
come back to haunt them unexpectedly in another.” Id.
at 1278. That kind of uncertainty surrounding the conse-
16 No. 09-3927

quences of one’s actions in another state is precisely
what the due process clause aims to prevent in the
context of specific jurisdiction. Id. at 1277-78; accord,
International Shoe, 326 U.S. at 317 (subjecting a corporate
defendant to suit on claims with no connection to its
activities in the forum state “has been thought to lay too
great and unreasonable a burden on the corporation to
comport with due process”).
Can we say more precisely how the plaintiff’s claim
and the defendant’s contacts must be related? Illustrating
competing approaches to this question, some circuits
have analogized the required relationship between con-
tacts and claims to the tort concepts of but-for and proxi-
mate causation. See Tamburo, 601 F.3d at 708-09, comparing
Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, Inc. v. American
Bar Ass’n, 142 F.3d 26, 35 (1st Cir. 1998) (requiring for a
tort claim that the defendant’s contacts be the proximate
or legal cause of the plaintiff’s injury); with Doe v.
American Nat’l Red Cross, 112 F.3d 1048, 1051 n.7 (9th
Cir. 1997) (requiring only that the defendant’s contacts be
the but-for cause of the plaintiff’s injury); Prejean v.
Sonatrach, Inc., 652 F.2d 1260, 1270 n.21 (5th Cir. 1981)
(same). We have not previously endorsed either approach,
see Tamburo, 601 F.3d at 709, and we decline to do so now.
The Third Circuit’s opinion in O’Connor v. Sandy Lane
Hotel Co., 496 F.3d 312 (3d Cir. 2007), shows why neither
of those conceptions of relatedness is entirely satisfac-
tory. In O’Connor, the plaintiffs were a Pennsylvania
couple who had been heavily solicited in Pennsylvania
by a resort in Barbados and contracted with the resort
No. 09-3927 17

for a spa vacation there. One of the plaintiffs suffered an
injury during their stay, and they sued the resort for
negligence in Pennsylvania. The Third Circuit held
that the resort was subject to personal jurisdiction in
Pennsylvania. The court followed the Supreme Court’s
lead in declining to apply a mechanical test, but tried to
provide structured guidance for district courts and liti-
gants. The Third Circuit focused on the “tacit quid pro
quo that makes litigation in the forum reasonably fore-
seeable:” out-of-state residents may avail themselves of
the benefits and protections of doing business in a
forum state, but they do so in exchange for submitting
to jurisdiction in that state for claims arising from or
relating to those activities. See id. at 322, citing Burger
King, 471 U.S. at 475-76.
On this understanding of relatedness, neither but-for
causation nor proximate causation is a satisfactory
guide. But-for causation would be “vastly overinclusive,”
haling defendants into court in the forum state even if
they gained nothing from those contacts. The tacit
quid pro quo would break down. See O’Connor, 496 F.3d
at 322-23. On the other hand, requiring proximate causa-
tion between contacts and claim would exclude too
many claims like the one in O’Connor, where the defen-
dant’s contacts with Pennsylvania proved little about
the plaintiff’s negligence claim, but undoubtedly gave
the defendant fair warning that the very business it
sought in Pennsylvania might injure a Pennsylvania
resident. See id. at 323-24. The precise causal relationship
between contacts and claim was not important; what was
required was that the relationship be “intimate enough
18 No. 09-3927

to keep the quid pro quo proportional and personal
jurisdiction reasonably foreseeable.” Id. at 323. The
Third Circuit’s approach follows carefully the Supreme
Court’s guidance on the question of relatedness. See
International Shoe, 326 U.S. at 319 (identifying exchange
of protection of laws of forum state for obligation to
respond there, and authorizing jurisdiction where the
obligations to respond “arise out of or are connected with
the activities within the state”); Burger King, 471 U.S. at
475-76. It is also consistent with our own precedent on
this subject. See RAR, 107 F.3d at 1278 (rejecting “but-for”
causation in contract case, and recognizing that the
“line will not always be a bright one”).
The relationship between GoDaddy’s Illinois contacts
and uBID’s claims is close enough to make the related-
ness quid pro quo balanced and reasonable. GoDaddy
has reached hundreds of thousands of people in Illinois
with its advertising, which we know because it has made
hundreds of thousands of sales in Illinois. How has
GoDaddy advertised and made these sales? Based on
the allegations in uBID’s complaint, it has done so “by
offering ‘free parking’ of a registrant’s domain name.”
Complaint ¶ 20. Looking to the forum state’s side of the
bargain, what does the plaintiff charge GoDaddy with
doing? The greatest part of uBID’s complaint is devoted
to allegations that, as the licensee of its registrants,
GoDaddy “used and trafficked in” the free parked pages
with bad-faith intent to profit from uBID’s marks. Com-
plaint ¶¶ 20-22; Ex. A. Substantively, the contacts alleged
in uBID’s complaint and the wrongs alleged in uBID’s
complaint are so intimately related that GoDaddy
No. 09-3927 19

cannot reasonably have been surprised to find itself sued
in Illinois. Temporally, too, the claim and the contacts
are inseparable. The allegedly infringing parked pages
were all active and garnering income at the time uBID
filed its complaint, see Compl. Ex. A, during which
time GoDaddy was also advertising and selling domain
names in Illinois through its parked page service. Cf.
GCIU-Employer Retirement Fund v. Goldfarb Corp., 565
F.3d 1018, 1024-25 (7th Cir. 2009) (affirming dismissal
for lack of personal jurisdiction where defendant sur-
rendered its controlling interest in a subsidiary in the
forum months before the sale of the subsidiary gave rise
to the lawsuit).
The concept of a geographical nexus is harder to apply
to cases like this one, where the alleged wrong can fairly
be characterized as occurring anywhere the Internet
is accessible. In other words, uBID has the same claim
against GoDaddy whether the customer who registered
or another similar domain name did so
from Illinois, from Wyoming, or from China. One con-
clusion we might draw from this fact is that a physical
geographical nexus is simply less important in cases
where the alleged harm occurred over the Internet. Such
a conclusion would not necessarily be inconsistent with
due process. After all, the geographical relationship
between claim and contacts is only one facet of the con-
stitutional inquiry. The plaintiff must still prove that the
defendant had constitutionally sufficient contacts with
the forum and that the defendant’s contacts were tempo-
rally and substantively related to the lawsuit. Without
that showing, the mere fact that the defendant allegedly
20 No. 09-3927

caused harm by conducting business or advertising over
the Internet is not adequate to establish jurisdiction in
the plaintiff’s chosen forum state. See, e.g., GTE New
Media Services Inc. v. BellSouth Corp., 199 F.3d 1343, 1350
(D.C. Cir. 2000); Cybersell, Inc. v. Cybersell, Inc., 130 F.3d 414,
418 (9th Cir. 1997).3
GoDaddy argues that the alleged injury to uBID was
not complete until GoDaddy connected the newly regis-
tered domain name to the parked page service. By this
logic, the location of GoDaddy’s alleged misconduct was
Arizona, no matter where the GoDaddy customer lived,
and uBID’s claim arising out of that misconduct is unre-
lated to any of GoDaddy’s contacts with Illinois.

3
This is true even if the website is highly interactive. The
parties urge us either to adopt or to reject the test for minimum
contacts based on website interactivity proposed in Zippo
Manufacturing Co. v. Zippo Dot Com, Inc., 952 F. Supp. 1119 (W.D.
Pa. 1997). We decline to adopt either view. When a plaintiff
alleges that some of the defendant’s contacts occurred
through a website, the interactivity of that website is relevant
to, but not dispositive of, the sufficiency of those contacts.
Using a separate test for Internet-based contacts would be
inappropriate when the traditional analysis of the “nature,
quality, and quantity of the contacts, as well as their relation to
the forum state,” remains up to this more modern task. Consult-
ing Engineers Corp. v. Geometric Ltd., 561 F.3d 273, 279 n.5 (4th
Cir. 2009); accord, State of Illinois v. Hemi Group, ___ F.3d at ___,
2010 WL 3547647, at *4 (stating that “the traditional due process
inquiry . . . is not so difficult to apply to cases involving
Internet contacts that courts need some sort of easier-to-apply
categorical test”); Tamburo, 601 F.3d at 703 n.7 (declining
to endorse special jurisdictional test for internet cases).
No. 09-3927 21

Due process does not require us to slice GoDaddy’s
alleged wrongdoing so finely. When customers go to
GoDaddy.com and register for GoDaddy’s parked page
or cash parking services, they pay a fee with the expecta-
tion that they will get what they’ve paid for. At that
point, GoDaddy is contractually obligated to commit the
wrong alleged by uBID. Where GoDaddy chooses to
locate the servers that complete the task is irrelevant. The
claim brought by uBID in Illinois arises directly out
of GoDaddy’s registration of the infringing domain
names bought by customers it has solicited in Illinois and
many other states. The claim bears a sufficient relation-
ship to GoDaddy’s business activities in Illinois to
expect GoDaddy to defend itself in Illinois without vio-
lating the due process clause.

C. A Final Look at Fairness
Before concluding the analysis, we must still satisfy
ourselves that the exercise of specific jurisdiction over
GoDaddy in Illinois would not offend traditional notions
of “fair play and substantial justice.” Burger King, 471 U.S.
at 476, quoting International Shoe, 326 U.S. at 320. The
concerns that the Supreme Court has identified for this
final inquiry are the burden on the defendant, the
forum state’s interest in adjudicating the dispute, the
plaintiff’s interest in obtaining convenient and effective
relief, the interstate judicial system’s interest in efficiently
resolving controversies, and the shared interest of the
states in furthering fundamental substantive social
policies. See id.
22 No. 09-3927

Some of these concerns counsel in favor of allowing
Illinois to exercise personal jurisdiction in this case;
none point the other way. The burden of defending a
lawsuit in Illinois is minimal for GoDaddy, a corpora-
tion with a broad enough reach to operate and market
its services on a national scale. Though uBID is also a
successful, sophisticated corporation, a finding that
GoDaddy is not subject to personal jurisdiction in a
forum it has so thoroughly exploited would create sig-
nificant barriers to effective relief for similarly situated
plaintiffs with more limited resources. We must also be
mindful of Illinois’s significant interest in providing a
forum for its residents to seek relief when they suffer
harm in Illinois from a wrong that occurred at least
in part in Illinois. Along those lines, we do not view the
presence of uBID’s headquarters in Illinois as necessary
to establish personal jurisdiction here, but we can agree
with our concurring colleague at least to the extent
that uBID’s presence does not weaken an already-sufficient
case for personal jurisdiction but actually strengthens
the case for the fairness of jurisdiction in Illinois.
We share our concurring colleague’s concern about
adopting an overly expansive test of jurisdiction for
internet-based commerce. See also State of Illinois v.
Hemi Group, ___ F.3d at ___, 2010 WL 3547647, at *6;
Jennings v. AC Hydraulic A/S, 383 F.3d 546, 549-50 (7th
Cir. 2004). GoDaddy’s contacts with Illinois are exten-
sive. It has hundreds of thousands of customers in the
state and earns millions of dollars in revenue from the
state each year. Illinois residents encounter GoDaddy’s
ads on television, on the Internet, and on billboards at
No. 09-3927 23

Wrigley Field and the United Center, among many others.
GoDaddy has continuously and deliberately exploited the
Illinois market for domain name registration and has
profited handsomely from it. Now GoDaddy is being
called to account for alleged harm to an Illinois resident
arising directly from the services GoDaddy provides to
its Illinois customers, at least two of whom registered
domain names that contributed to the alleged harm.
There is no unfairness in requiring GoDaddy to defend
that lawsuit in the courts of the state where, through the
very activity giving rise to the suit, it continues to gain so
much. See State of Illinois v. Hemi Group, ___ F.3d at ___,
2010 WL 3547647, at *6 (finding that jurisdiction in
Illinois was fair where defendant had set up “expansive,
sophisticated commercial venture online,” held itself
out to conduct business nationwide, and succeeded in
reaching customers across the country).
We recognize that our analysis here does not provide
crisp, bright lines for district courts and litigants, but
this is a field of law where the Supreme Court has repeat-
edly refused opportunities to draw such bright lines. See,
e.g., Burger King, 471 U.S. at 486 & n.29 (standard of
“ ‘fair play and substantial justice’ necessarily requires
determinations ‘in which few answers will be written “in
black and white. The greys are dominant and even
among them the shades are innumerable.” ’ ”), quoting
Kulko v. California Superior Court, 436 U.S. 84, 92 (1978). In
this case, the “relationship among the defendant, the
forum, and the litigation,” see Shaffer v. Heitner, 433 U.S.
186, 204 (1977), is close enough not to offend due process.
24 No. 09-3927

Accordingly, we R EVERSE the district court’s judgment
dismissing the suit for lack of personal jurisdiction and
R EMAND for further proceedings.

M ANION , Circuit Judge, concurring. I agree with the
court that personal jurisdiction in Illinois is proper.
I write separately because under the facts of this case,
I would apply a more limited formula for connecting
GoDaddy’s contacts in Illinois with uBID’s claim. In my
view, personal jurisdiction in Illinois is proper for the
simple reason that uBID is headquartered in Illinois, and
that is where GoDaddy has directed, and uBID will be
affected by, the harm at issue.
This is a difficult case, in a difficult area of the law. Our
case law centers on ambiguous tests and turns on
varying facts that prevent courts and practitioners from
discerning bright lines. Looking at the same set of cases
with the same set of facts, reasonable minds can disagree
about whether and how a certain combination of facts
suffices to establish personal jurisdiction. This is such
a case.
There are three contacts that tie GoDaddy to Illinois:
one, its advertising at sporting events in Illinois; two, its
website service contracts with hundreds of thousands of
No. 09-3927 25

Illinois residents; and three, the advertising it places
on “parked pages” with domain names that infringe
on uBID’s trademark. Following Keeton v. Hustler Maga-
zine, Inc., 465 U.S. 770 (1984), the court emphasizes the
importance of the first two contacts and finds that the
plaintiff’s claim arises out of them. Under the court’s
analysis, the contacts and the claim under the Anti-
Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, 15 U.S.C.
§ 1125(d) (“Act”), are close enough to make “the related-
ness quid pro quo balanced and reasonable.” Op at 18.
Thus, it is fair that GoDaddy should be held accountable
in Illinois.
The court’s formula for connecting GoDaddy’s con-
tacts in Illinois with uBID’s claim is, in my view, unneces-
sarily broad. uBID’s claim is not that GoDaddy’s
conduct violates the Act when it merely registers an
infringing domain name. In fact, such a claim would not
be actionable under the Act, which limits liability to
damages “for the registration or maintenance of a
domain name” where there is “a showing of bad faith intent
to profit from such registration or maintenance of the
domain name.” Id. § 1114(D)(iii) (emphasis added).
Rather, uBID claims that GoDaddy is acting as a cyber-
squatter or typosquatter, depending on what derivative
of uBID’s domain name is used. In this capacity it
takes these infringing domain names, puts up a parked
page, and on the parked pages places links and advertise-
ments to other websites—advertisements that GoDaddy
exclusively controls. Most of these links and advertise-
ments are for uBID’s competitors. For example, when
someone mistakenly searches for uBID by typing
26 No. 09-3927

“youbid,” he is directed to a parked page covered with
advertisements for uBID’s competitors. When the
person clicks on one of the advertisements, GoDaddy
generates revenue for itself.
According to uBID, GoDaddy engages in a heightened
form of cybersquatting, by trafficking these infringing
domain names and placing advertising on them to
generate revenue for itself. In this way, GoDaddy has
monetized the infringing domain names and violated the
Act. Complaint ¶ 32. According to uBID, GoDaddy’s
behavior has taken three forms: one, it has trafficked
in these deceptive domain names, even when it knew
they were identical or confusingly similar to uBID’s
protected and valuable marks; two, it has offered to sell
or otherwise assign the deceptive domains for financial
gain; and three, it has trafficked in and used these de-
ceptive domain names to divert customers from uBID’s
website. Id. ¶¶ 41-43. In sum, GoDaddy is engaged in
cybersquatting. Of course, GoDaddy denies all of this.
The problem with cybersquatting websites is well-
documented. J. Thomas McCarthy, McCarthy on Trademarks
and Unfair Competition, § 25:77 (4th ed. 2010). These
websites and domain names do not exist for a legitimate
purpose. Instead, the owners wait for a company like
uBID to buy the infringing domain name, and in the
meantime GoDaddy as their licensee helps siphon cus-
tomers away from uBID by drawing the typo-prone to
uBID’s competitors. Understood in this way, the claim
uBID has against GoDaddy does not relate to GoDaddy’s
contracts with hundreds of thousands of Illinois resi-
No. 09-3927 27

dents, nor does it arise out of its advertising at sporting
events. Instead, the claim centers on how GoDaddy’s
actions with these infringing domain names constitutes
cybersquatting.
By viewing the claim this way, the Keeton analysis does
not govern. Rather, the analysis from Calder v. Jones, 465
U.S. 783, 789-90 (1984), for intentional harms directed
at other states should be used. Although the distinction
may be slight, the result is significant. Using the Keeton
formula subjects GoDaddy to personal jurisdiction for
uBID’s claim in any state that GoDaddy advertises and
has customers—including at least one customer who
registers an infringing domain name. That could be
every state in the Union. While Hustler Magazine ex-
pressed similar shock at being haled into a New Hamp-
shire court, a few billboards and clients in a state and
web advertisements are not the same as 15,000 copies of
a libelous magazine in the hands of people located there.
Using the analysis from Calder fits with the harm
GoDaddy alleges and accords with the way we and
other circuits have analyzed personal jurisdiction in
these sorts of cases involving the internet.1 Calder has three

1
E.g., Tamburo v. Dworkin, 601 F.3d 693, 703 (7th Cir. 2010);
Pebble Beach Co. v. Caddy, 453 F.3d 1151, 1156 (9th Cir. 2006);
Revell v. Lidov, 317 F.3d 467, 472-73 (5th Cir. 2002); ALS Scan, Inc.
v. Digital Serv. Consultants, Inc., 293 F.3d 707 (4th Cir. 2002);
Dudnikov v. Chalk & Vermilion Fine Arts, Inc., 514 F.3d 1063, 1068
(10th Cir. 2008); Licciardello v. Lovelady, 544 F.3d 1280, 1288
(continued...)
28 No. 09-3927

requirements for personal jurisdiction: (1) intentional
conduct; (2) expressly aimed at the forum state; (3) with
the defendant’s knowledge that the plaintiff would
be injured in the forum state. Tamburo, 601 F.3d at 703.
GoDaddy’s alleged bad faith covers all three. First,
GoDaddy’s conduct is intentional. Normally, a trade-
mark violation does not have to be intentional. McCarthy,
supra § 32.38. But in this case it does: to have a claim
under the Act, uBID must show that GoDaddy acted
with a bad-faith intent to profit from the registration or
maintenance of the domain name. 15 U.S.C. § 1114(D)(iii).
In this context, “bad faith” can be established in many
ways. Id. § 1125(d)(1)(B)(i) (providing a non-exhaustive
list of nine factors for courts to consider); see also
McCarthy, supra § 25.78 (discussing each). Two of the
four factors that indicate “bad faith” involve knowledge
of the rightful owner and knowledge that the actions
will harm the owner’s mark or business. Id. (specifically
factors 5 and 6). And uBID’s allegations of intentional
conduct closely track the language of the statute.
Second, this intentional conduct is aimed at Illinois.
uBID’s claim is that GoDaddy is engaged in cyber-
squatting and typosquatting. Both activities are done
around and in reference to a legitimate and valuable
domain name. Cybersquatters register these domain
names to force “the rightful owners of the marks to pay

1
(...continued)
(11th Cir. 2008); see also Teresa J. Cassidy, Civil Procedure—Effects
of the “Effects Test,” 9 Wyo. L. Rev. 575, 591-92 (2009).
No. 09-3927 29

for the right to engage in electronic commerce under
their own brand name.” Virtual Works, Inc. v. Volkswagen
of America, 238 F.3d 264, 267 (4th Cir. 2001) (quotation
omitted). Cybersquatting is nothing more than a scheme
to defraud businesses. It is not carried out aimlessly
or indiscriminately but targeted against the rightful
owner in hopes they will pay for the infringing website,
rather than incur the costs of going through the courts.
Id.; Coca-Cola Co. v. Purdy, 382 F.3d 774, 778 (8th Cir.
2004). The complaint alleges that GoDaddy diverts cus-
tomers to uBID’s competitors and diminishes the value
of uBID’s domain name, until uBID buys the infringing
domain name or attains it through legal action. E.g.,
Harrods Ltd. v. Sixty Internet Domain Names, 302 F.3d 214
(4th Cir. 2002) (an example of such an action). In this
way, the conduct is aimed at uBID’s headquarters, in
Illinois, where it will be harmed because of lost revenue.
See Panavision Int’l L.P. v. Toeppen, 141 F.3d 1316, 1322
(9th Cir. 1998).
Third, uBID’s claim is that GoDaddy engaged in
cybersquatting. If this is proven, these would not be
random, fortuitous, or attenuated acts: rather, these are
intentional, deliberate, and targeted acts against uBID.
GoDaddy knew the harm was directed at Illinois: it
knew that uBID, domiciled in Illinois, owned the
UBID.com domain name, and it knew that these pages
infringed on that name. What is more, it trafficked and
profited from the domain names until uBID sought to
buy them or stop them through the courts. Toeppen, 141
F.3d at 1322. In practical terms, this is a targeted scheme
against uBID: a scheme that affects its bottom line. And
30 No. 09-3927

this affects it in Illinois, where uBID is incorporated,
where it pays state income and property taxes, and
where it has many employees. See World-Wide Volkswagen
Corp. v. Woodson, 444 U.S. 286, 297 (1980) (noting “it is
that the defendant’s conduct and connection with the
forum State are such that he should reasonably
anticipate being haled into court there.”).
The fact that uBID is incorporated in Illinois and the
natural and deliberate impact GoDaddy’s actions will
have on uBID is in Illinois distinguishes Illinois from every
other state where GoDaddy simply advertises and has
customers. And GoDaddy’s intentional acts directed at
uBID and their effect on uBID are what allow Illinois’s
long-arm statute to reach GoDaddy. See Lovelady, 544 F.3d
at 1288; Indianapolis Colts, Inc. v. Metropolitan Baltimore
Football Club Ltd. P’ship, 34 F.3d 410, 411-412 (7th Cir. 1994).
That being said, I agree with the court that there is
tension in our case law about the scope and limits of the
“express aiming” test from Calder. Op. at 11, n.1. It has
been well documented. Nerds on Call, Inc. (Indiana) v. Nerds
on Call, Inc. (California), 598 F. Supp.2d 913, 916-19 (S.D.
Ind. 2008) (Hamilton, J.) (cited and discussed in Tamburo,
601 F.3d at 706). But that tension is not a reason to shy
away from using Calder in cases like this, where the
intentional acts are clearly directed at Illinois. And to the
extent that “something more” is required, the court’s
opinion and the myriad of facts it recounts about
GoDaddy’s behavior in Illinois satisfies even the
strictest ideas of what constitutes “something more.”
Again, this is not a well-developed area of the law, and
reasonable minds can disagree on what facts are
No. 09-3927 31

important, the way a harm should be framed, and the
analysis to use. While I agree with much of the court’s
analysis, I write separately to emphasize that uBID is
headquartered in Illinois, which is what I see as the
critical link between GoDaddy’s actions and finding it
subject to personal jurisdiction in Illinois: given the
nature of the complaint we should apply the analysis
from Calder v. Jones.
For these reasons, I respectfully concur in the court’s
judgment.

9-29-10