The Canadian company publicly attacked WIPO, the best known of the four dispute resolution providers. In a statement, eResolution said the rules of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) have created a “forum-shopping phenomenon.” According to the statement:
"The ICANN system was originally meant to allow for fair competition between accredited dispute resolution providers. But the accreditation as provider of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a United Nations agency which contributed the draft of the UDRP [the rules] and whose purpose is to enhance the protection of intellectual property, tilted the balance from the outset.
"The system gave complainants, who invoke intellectual property rights, the privilege to choose the provider. And statistics were soon released, and later confirmed, showing that complainants tended to win significantly more often with some providers, notably WIPO, than with others, notably eResolution, creating a perception of bias from which the system never recovered."
The Canadian company suggests that its lower complainant success rate might be explained by its higher rate of contested cases, which in turn might be linked to the ease with which defending parties may file an on-line response with eResolution.
The market share of eResolution shrank to a point where the proceeds of disputes no longer covered the costs of maintaining the service. Professor Karim Benyekhlef, eResolution's President, said: “In the end, we were, for all practical purposes, financing the legitimisation of a system we knew badly needed change."
The Montreal-based company said it will take all of its pending cases to their completion but will not accept new cases. Instead, it will now step-up its other activities as a software developer and ASP solutions provider. It will continue to provide other on-line commercial dispute resolution services. Its withdrawal from arbitration of generic top level domain name disputes under the UDRP leaves only three ICANN approved bodies: WIPO, based in Geneva, the National Arbitration Forum, based in Minneapolis, and the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution, based in New York.