The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has announced a significant step to shorten the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) process in some cases, without short-circuiting any of the protections available to domain name registrants. WIPO refers to its solution as “expedited case processing.” In short, if a trademark owner is willing to pay a higher filing fee, WIPO says that a case “will be managed by a dedicated team and decided by a special roster of panelists” and that it will “commit to decision delivery in one-month from start to finish in UDRP cases.”

Data in the newest issue (Q4 2025) of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest show shows that the number of decisions across all five service providers for the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) decreased (very slightly) slightly in 2025.

The number of decisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) rose 9.89 percent in the third quarter of 2025, from the same period a year ago, according to data in the newest issue of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest.

Although it sometimes seems like it receives a lot of attention, Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH) is a very uncommon finding in domain name dispute cases. Across all service providers under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), panels in only 1.3 percent of decisions issued a finding of RDNH in the second quarter of 2025.

Although the number of UDRP decisions and disputed domain names dropped in the first quarter of the year, 2025 is shaping up to have a similar number of disputes as in 2024 (the second-most active year ever for the UDRP), as the data in the current issue (Q1 2025) of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest makes clear.

This 20-minute audio file — an AI-generated podcast — is based on the just-released issue of GigaLaw’s quarterly Domain Dispute Digest for Q4 2024, which provides detailed data about decisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS).

Domain name disputes under the UDRP rose by 3.1 percent in 2024, an indication that cybersquatting remains a significant problem for trademark owners. Fortunately, though, the UDRP is still an incredibly effective tool, with more than 95 precent of decisions last quarter resulting in orders to transfer disputed domain names to the trademark owners who filed the complaints.

The number of decisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – as well as the total number of domain names contained within those decisions – dropped in the third quarter of 2024. This represents the first decline since I began compiling and publishing this data more than four years ago.

The 10-year streak of record-setting filings under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) may come to an end this year, based on data obtained for this issue of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest, but the decline – if any – is likely to be inconsequential.

I recently interviewed my fellow UDRP panelist Professor Andrew Christie, chair of intellectual property at Melbourne Law School. He created the “passive holding” doctrine in only the second decision ever published under the UDRP, in 2000. The case, Telstra v. Nuclear Marshmallows, is truly a landmark decision because it addressed how a domain name not associated with an active website could be considered that it “is being used in bad faith,” as the UDRP requires.