Dispute Resolution Service

27 February 2001

Dawn Osborne
Willoughby & Partners/Rouse & Co International

Possible areas of the policy which need to be carefully examined include

1. The restriction of focus to the decisions of UK Courts. Registrants of .uk names can be based anywhere and rules of jurisdiction under, for example, the Brussels Convention or the Community Trade Mark Regulations may mean that there could be very good reasons for suing in a Court other than the UK. Foreign judgements could well be enforceable in the UK.
2. The relatively parsimonious word limit for Complaints and Responses. Two thousand words may not be enough where there is a long history to the dispute or complicated facts which need to be explained. One example recently in our experience in an ICANN dispute involved a registrant which had used aliases to hide domain name warehousing in a case where he owned many such names and the links between the aliases need to be explained carefully in enough detail to prove our case.