Conference - Opening Remarks

Frank Fowlie - ICANN

Frank mentioned the fact that the conference is attended by judges, lawyers, IT people, public servants, peacekeepers and others from places like the EU, Cairo, Tokyo, California.

Colin Rule - PayPal, Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Colin encouraged the group to recognize that it has come together to take on the task of developing a blueprint for a worldwide dispute resolution system. He contends that we are closer than ever to making it happen.

Some of Colin's talking points:

• Our existing legal mechanisms will not scale to the existing reality in the online world.
• The UNCITRAL working group will go a long way to designing a new system.

Reflections from the eBay/Paypal experience:

• Many consumers and businesses would rather lose quickly on smaller disputes than have it drag on and on with a chance you might eventually 'win'
• At eBay, users want technology assisted negotiation. Technology makes it cheap. Mediation can be too expensive for users. But, technology-assisted negotiation need not be exclusive.
• Higher value disputes will inevitably require more procedural design.

Vikki Rogers - Institute of International Commercial Law, Fordham University of Law

Technology is the new player in the world of dispute resolution. ODR is a piece of the puzzle that will provide avenue for redress of disputes that has not existed before.

Vikki's talking points:

• Cross border sales are a necessary component of economic success in today's world
• ODR is a necessary element to build confidence and to allow governments to protect citizens in cross border transactions
• It's no longer reasonable to assume that low-value cross-border disputes will be resolved in court.
• ODR can handle high volumes of low volume disputes.
• UNCITRAL ODR Working Group is gaining momentum, and is looking at creating generic rules for business-to-business and business-to-consumer disputes

Zbynek Loebl - ADR.EU

Zbynek asks the question: are we creating a global system, or looking for connectivity between existing systems? He notes that current systems like eBay/Paypal are global. The Internet is global. But, how will states interact?

Zbynek's talking points:

• Would a global system have to feature multilinuality? How would we deal with it?
• Large corporations have already built global, cross-border, multilingual platforms. How can we bring their experience in narrow commerical contexts (e.g. credit cards) into a more general context?
• Existing systems all have built-in efficient remdies. Can we connect them between states and systems?
• Who will build the system? Should it be governmental, private or quasi private-public?