ICANN's 'Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy' – Causes and (Partial) Cures

Abstract

Part I of this article introduces the political and technical background that produced the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’s (“ICANN”) Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy and discusses the main precursor to the UDRP, the WIPO Report entitled The Management of Internet Names and Addresses: Intellectual Property Issues which proposed a new global domain name regulatory regime optimized for trademark protection. Part II sets out the main features of the UDRP and ICANN’s accompanying rules of procedure and compares them to WIPO’s proposals. Part III offers a number of practical suggestions for reform of the procedural aspects of the UDRP.

Keywords: ICANN, Internet law, Internet governance, UDRP, DNS, domain names, IP law, intellectual property