Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and Hinge, has “without question” been functioning as a monopoly, according to Muzz, the founder of the world’s largest Muslim dating app, who lost a trademark appeal in the UK on Thursday.
Younas’ remarks follow a years-long legal struggle between two companies that resulted in Muzz changing its company name and losing its trademark in a UK appeal on Thursday.
“Match Group has over 50 different dating app properties and allegedly owns more than half of the global dating market.” They exploit their dominance and aggressive defence of abstract patents to intimidate other actors in the sector, particularly those without the resources to defend themselves.”
Despite settling in the United States and changing its name from muzmatch to Muzz in May of last year, the UK appeal was denied, and the original judgement was upheld.
Muzz has now requested that the Federal Trade Commission look into Match Group’s anti-competitive practises. Muzz claimed in a statement made on Thursday that the judges ignored their eleven years of “honest concurrent use” of muzmatch alongside Match Group, as well as the “distinct lack of confusion between the two companies.”
“The dangerous precedent that we believe has been established here is the ability for large conglomerates to begin enforcing trademarks on common English language – and descriptive generic words like match.” Since 2011, we have used the word match in a descriptive sense in all of our brand usage.
“Our intention was never to link ourselves with Match.com – such a link would be detrimental to our business.” It is profoundly unfortunate that the courts believe otherwise. This struggle demonstrated the strategies that large monopoly players will employ to hinder and suppress competition in order to drain their resources.
