RA Daniel Dingeldey, December 20, 2024
The Arab Center for Domain Dispute Resolution (ACDR), founded in 2013, has officially ceased its operations. It becomes the third ICANN-accredited dispute resolution center for UDRP disputes to stop functioning.
The ACDR was established in 2013 by the Arab Intellectual Property Mediation and Arbitration Society (AIPMAS) and the Arab Society for Intellectual Property (ASIP), both of which are nonprofit organizations chaired by H.E. Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh. The ACDR was the fifth ICANN-accredited active dispute resolution center globally and the first provider of uniform dispute resolution policies for domain name disputes in the Middle East and North Africa. ICANN’s Board of Directors approved ACDR’s application on May 18, 2013, and the center began its work later that same year. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), only a few cases were ever submitted to the ACDR. According to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) Status Report – Policy Status Report from March 2023 and its revised version from July 2023, only nine cases had been handled by the ACDR until 2020: four cases each in 2017 and 2019, and one in 2016.
Given the low volume of cases, it seems that maintaining the ACDR may have been unjustifiable. However, it remains unclear whether this was the actual reason for its closure, as no concrete information has been found regarding this or the exact date when the ACDR was reclassified as a “Former Provider.” The ACDR’s website is no longer accessible, and decisions cannot be viewed directly. However, some decisions can still be accessed via archive.org, with three decisions available.
In addition to the ACDR, which has completely ceased its operations (similar to eResolution, which had stopped its work before ACDR’s accreditation), the “CPR: International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution” is no longer active for ICANN but continues to provide dispute resolution services in other fields. Currently, there are five active UDRP providers: WIPO, NAF (Forum), CAC, CIIDRC (Canadian International Internet Dispute Resolution Centre), and ADNDRC (Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre).
News Source:Daniel Dingeldey，This article does not represent our position.
