The World Intellectual Property Organization's Arbitration and Mediation Centre (WIPO) — well-known as the leading provider of domain name dispute services, including under the popular Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) — is taking over responsibility for the “administrative and backend processes” of Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) for .uk domain names, both organizations have announced.
The change, effective as of July 7, 2026, will not alter the substantive requirements of the DRS, which will continue to focus on whether a disputed domain name is an “Abusive Registration” as defined by the policy. Instead, as WIPO and Nominet have said, the change simply means that “all the administrative processes behind the operation of the DRS are moving away from Nominet to WIPO as a specialist dispute resolution service provider.”
With the addition of .uk to its portfolio, WIPO will soon be responsible for providing or assisting with domain name dispute services under 90 top-level domains, including 49 that — like the DRS for .uk — have adopted a policy other than the UDRP.
The DRS was launched in 2001, two years after the UDRP, and has been described by Nominet and WIPO as “a fast and cost-effective route for resolving .UK domain disputes efficiently and fairly, without going to court” — a description that could similarly describe the UDRP.
Unlike the UDRP, where decisions often focus on whether a domain name has been registered and used “in bad faith,” the DRS is primarily concerned with what it calls an “Abusive Registration,” defined as a domain name that either:
i. was registered or otherwise acquired in a manner which, at the time when the registration or acquisition took place, took unfair advantage of or was unfairly detrimental to the Complainant's Rights; or
ii. is being or has been used in a manner which has taken unfair advantage of or has been unfairly detrimental to the Complainant's Rights.
The DRS contains a non-exhaustive list of factors that may be evidence of an Abusive Registration.
The DRS also differs from the UDRP in several other respects, including:
The DRS includes a mediation process that can occur if a domain name registrant files a response.
The DRS does not require a filing fee when a complaint is submitted. Instead, a complainant is required to pay for either an inexpensive short-form summary decision (available only if the domain name registrant fails to submit a response) or a higher-priced full expert decision.
The DRS allows either party to file an appeal, which will be heard by a three-member “Expert Review Group.”
Nominet has said that it had more than 600 DRS disputes in 2025 and more than 16,000 since the policy went into effect 25 years ago. By comparison, the five UDRP service providers (of which WIPO is one) issued 8,476 UDRP decisions in 2025 alone, involving 13,739 domain names, according the Q4 2025 issue of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest.
Personally, I have filed (and won) a number of DRS complaints on behalf of my trademark owner clients through the years and have found the policy to be a helpful and efficient way to resolve cybersquatting issues — though, in my experience, the mediation process has had limited or no benefit in most cases.
Importantly, while some attorneys experienced with the UDRP may think the DRS can be handled in the same manner, the differences noted above (and many others) are important. Indeed, the foreword to the “Expert’s Overview” of the DRS includes the following note of caution:
[I]t should be stressed for the benefit of those who have had experience of domain name disputes under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (“UDRP”), that the DRS Policy and the UDRP are different systems. In some places they share very similar wording, but there are significant differences and the citation of UDRP decisions in a dispute under the DRS Policy is rarely likely to be helpful.
I welcome WIPO as the new service provider for DRS proceedings and expect its long track record of providing high-quality domain name dispute services to be beneficial for trademark owners in .uk cases.
