WIPO's role as a provider of domain name dispute resolution services
The writer has been attending the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center’s two workshops in Geneva over the past week, one on Arbitration and the other an “Advanced Workshop on Domain Name Dispute Resolution”. It is from the latter that I shamelessly crib the statistics carefully compiled by the Center’s Erik Wilbers and David Roache-Turner (the latter an Australian national).
Nearly 170 million domain names have been registered to date. Nearly 110 million of these are in the United States of America. Some U.S. citizens are known to love a barney.
The Centre (in Australian English) is the original ICANN-accredited provider of domain name dispute resolution services. It has received more than 14,000 cases for gTLD’s (Global Top Level Domains, such as .com) and ccTLD’s (Country Code Top Level Domains, such as .com.au) since 1999, covering more than 25,000 disputed domain names. As at 21 October 2008, 1843 cases had been filed with the Centre this year, averaging 6 new cases each calendar day. The Centre acts as a case manager and secretariat, using staff (most of whom are lawyers) from 25 nations with skills in 17 languages.
Naturally the United States of America tops the lists of Complainant and Respondent countries, with 44.16% and 39.76% of those filed, respectively. Australia finishes 9th on the list of Complainant countries, filing only 257 cases since 1999 or 1.82% of the total. In Respondent filings, Australia did a little better and is presently ranked 8th, apparently annoying a Complainant somewhere in 338 cases, or 2.39% of the total filings. Surprisingly, it seems that Australians are far more annoying than New Zealanders, who are ranked 25th on the list with only 0.5% of Respondent filings against them. There is a lower level of economic activity in New Zealand due to its smaller population but, per capita, they still appear to be less annoying, which is anomalous empirically.
Australia is ranked 5th in ccTLD filings, behind France, Switzerland, Tuvalu and Estonia. Tuvalu’s .tv ccTLD has been commercialised, giving it an anomalous desirability.
Overall, cases are denied only 15% of the time. Cancellation of a domain is ordered in 1% of cases, and transfer in the other 84%. The Centre’s WIPO Panel Decision Overview observes that “the UDRP does not operate on a strict doctrine of precedent. However, panels consider it desirable that their decisions are consistent with prior panel decisions dealing with similar fact situations.”
Reviewing the substantive criteria and principles of panel decisions is beyond the scope of this article. However, two major developments are likely to change the mix of disputes brought to the Centre. One is the existing, but relatively recent, internationalisation of domain names to include non-ASCII or English symbols or strings.
The other is the new gTLD ‘internationalised domain names’ program proposed by ICANN, Under this program, it is proposed that (in summary), generic, geographical and brand names can be registered to the right of the last dot (for example, .sydney, .aboriginal, .christian and so on). These may conflict with existing gTLD’s and ccTLD’s and with trade marks in various jurisdictions. One instructor described the proposal as ‘the Full Employment Act for domain name practitioners.”
Nick Weston
