The Canadian company publicly attacked WIPO, the best known of
the four dispute resolution providers. In a statement, eResolution
said the rules of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers) have created a “forum-shopping phenomenon.”
According to the statement:
"The ICANN system was originally meant to
allow for fair competition between accredited dispute resolution
providers. But the accreditation as provider of the World
Intellectual Property Organisation, a United Nations agency which
contributed the draft of the UDRP [the rules] and whose purpose is
to enhance the protection of intellectual property, tilted the
balance from the outset.
"The system gave complainants, who invoke
intellectual property rights, the privilege to choose the provider.
And statistics were soon released, and later confirmed, showing
that complainants tended to win significantly more often with some
providers, notably WIPO, than with others, notably eResolution,
creating a perception of bias from which the system never
recovered."
The Canadian company suggests that its lower complainant success
rate might be explained by its higher rate of contested cases,
which in turn might be linked to the ease with which defending
parties may file an on-line response with eResolution.
The market share of eResolution shrank to a point where the
proceeds of disputes no longer covered the costs of maintaining the
service. Professor Karim Benyekhlef, eResolution's President, said:
“In the end, we were, for all practical purposes, financing the
legitimisation of a system we knew badly needed change."
The Montreal-based company said it will take all of its pending
cases to their completion but will not accept new cases. Instead,
it will now step-up its other activities as a software developer
and ASP solutions provider. It will continue to provide other
on-line commercial dispute resolution services. Its withdrawal from
arbitration of generic top level domain name disputes under the
UDRP leaves only three ICANN approved bodies: WIPO, based in
Geneva, the National Arbitration Forum, based in Minneapolis, and
the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution, based in New York.
