I am sure that a sufficiently motivated researcher could find paid service date match making companies with something "match" in the name going back to the 1970s, when it was all done manually and by telephone, or the 80s and by fax.

That just doesn’t matter, legally. There were presumably people named Wendy for a long time but I can’t start a burger joint named Wendy’s, even if my name was Wendy.

If Match.com established the brand other people can’t. I didn’t make the law but people are downvoting me like I did, I just pointed out (and IANAL so maybe I’m wrong) that this seems like clear brand harm.

But they did officially brand it—-it’s not just the idea of matching. One way in which this does have some real use is in protecting users. Maybe Match has some set of privacy values that people have come to trust, and by letting other companies who don’t share the same values co-opt the brand recognition, it can cause issues for users who thought they were protected by Match’s privacy policies.