The greatest horse-based web domain in history is no more: Walmart.horse has disappeared from the internet following a complaint from the American megastore chain.

Registered in late February by Massachusetts-based cartoonist Jeph Jacques, author of webcomic Questionable Content, Walmart.horse was a simple website containing nothing but a picture of a horse superimposed on top of a Walmart store.

In early March, Walmart sent Jacques a cease-and-desist letter, arguing that he was infringing on the company’s trademark. In response, Jacques told them that the site was “an obvious parody, and therefore falls under fair use”, and refused to take the page down.

That seemed to be the end of the matter until Walmart responded in April by filing a plea with the World Intellectual Property Organisation under the organisation’s “Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy” (UDRP). The policy allows for trademark holders to seize control of domains that they don’t own, but which are “confusingly similar” to a trademark and registered and being used “in bad faith”.

“The UDRP is a domain name dispute resolution process that was designed to address cybersquatting issues,” says Roberto Ledesma, a New York-based trademark lawyer. “This is reflected in the elements needed to prevail in a UDRP, which requires that the domain name has been registered in ‘bad faith’ and without rights or legitimate interests in the domain.

“It’s not entirely clear how Jacques’ case would have turned out. His domain name included one of the new gTLDs [generic top-level domains] (.HORSE), which are raising novel cybersquatting issues, especially where the domain name registrant is using the site to parody a trademark holder or for some other apparent fair use purpose.”

Three weeks after the UDRP policy was filed, the Walmart.horse site was taken down, and public records show that the domain has been owned by Walmart itself since Monday 18 May.

“The Walmart.horse UDRP was ‘terminated’, which means that the proceeding ended before getting to a panel,” Ledesma said.

Jacques later told the Guardian that he gave up the domain in the face of legal pressure from Walmart. “I didn’t feel like fighting them any more,” he said.

Dot-horse is one of a raft of 2,000 new gTLDs approved since 2013, with the aim of allowing websites to clearly target niche sections of society. In the application to the web’s overseeing body, ICANN, the creators of the domain argued that “the purpose of the .HORSE gTLD is to offer horse owners, service providers, horse industry employees and volunteers the opportunity to clearly define their presence on the internet and to help potential customers gain access to content about horses.”

It entered the market alongside similar domains such as .dog, also designed to appeal to animal lovers. But the rash of new domains also caused fear among trademark holders of a new set of “cybersquatting” problems, where domains are bought up purely to sell them back to trademark holders at inflated prices.

Most notoriously, the .sucks domain offered trademark holders the chance to buy their name on the domain before others – in a move that was seen by many as a veiled threat.

And in March, it was revealed that pop star Taylor Swift had purchased several domain names intended for use in the adult industry, including TaylorSwift.xxx and TaylorSwift.porn, to prevent others buying them first.

But Swift didn’t register every alternative domain: TaylorSwift.horse is still live. It features a picture of Taylor Swift standing on a horse. The picture is captioned “I’m on a horse”.

Updated to clarify that only the .dog domain is intended to appeal to animal lovers. The .cat domain, which does exist, is actually intended “to serve the needs of the Catalan Linguistic and Cultural Community on the Internet.”