The number of domain name disputes filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) climbed for the sixth consecutive year in 2019. The total number of cases increased more than 7 percent, setting another all-time record for the most popular provider of services under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and other domain dispute policies.
Click for chart of WIPO Domain Name Disputes, 1999-2019
The total number of UDRP-specific disputes at WIPO rose 8.9 percent, to 3,216 cases, while cases handled by WIPO under other policies applicable to country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) dropped slightly, about 3.6 percent, to 477.
Meanwhile, the total number of domain names in those disputes increased significantly in 2019, about 11.3 percent, to 6,296 domain names, after dropping the previous year.
While WIPO is only one of six UDRP service providers, it is the most active and the only one that regularly provides access to statistics about its caseload. At the Forum (formerly the National Arbitration Forum), the second most-popular domain name dispute provider, it appears as if 1,562 UDRP decisions were published last year, essentially unchanged from the 1,574 cases in 2018.
The newest UDRP service provider, the Canadian International Internet Dispute Resolution Centre — which started accepting cases in November — issued only one decision in 2019, on the next-to-last day of the year.
WIPO has not yet explained why it saw a record number of domain name disputes in 2019. But last year, it attributed its increasing caseload under the UDRP and other policies in 2018 to “the proliferation of websites used for counterfeit sales, fraud, phishing, and other forms of online trademark abuse.”
The overall increase in domain name registrations (up 5.1 million domain names to 359.8 million, according to the most recent data from Verisign) as well as the continued, albeit slow, growth of new gTLDs, may be responsible for at least part of the rise in disputes. Plus, after more than 20 years, the UDRP is well-established as the most common way of resolving domain name disputes.
