Nick Wood of the MARQUES Cyberspace Team looks ahead to Workshop 4 at this year’s Annual Conference, titled “Improving the UDRP”.

The UDRP is arguably ICANN’s most successful consensus policy. Since its launch in late 1999, over 140,000 cases have been filed by rights owners at WIPO and FORUM. The UDRP is praised for giving rights owners a low-cost mechanism for recovering an infringing domain name. It is effective across borders, with a predictable process and reasonable timelines. It keeps infringers out of court too.

However, there is a belief that everything can be improved. ICANN announced five years ago that the UDRP needed to be reviewed, as it periodically reviews all of its consensus policies. This was greeted with anxiety by rights owners who feared unnecessary changes.

At the time Brian Beckham, Head of the Internet Dispute Resolution Section at WIPO said: “Any recommendations should be borne out by a demonstrated compelling need for a change. Any perceived case-specific or anecdotal faults of the UDRP do not warrant a wholesale revision of this industry best practice."

Project Team

In late 2024, WIPO teamed up with the Internet Commerce Association, which represents domainers who make their living by monetising domains, to look at non-contentious ways the UDRP could be improved.

This was a private initiative, outside the auspices of ICANN, featuring a Project Team made up of experts on the UDRP who regularly sit as panellists or assist complainants or defendants. ICANN Board Member Sarah Deutsch joined as an official ICANN liaison. Several members of the MARQUES Cyberspace Team including Georges Nahitchevansky and Luca Barbero participated.

The Project Team looked at 24 topics, which they divided into four categories from Tier One – Recommendations with Unanimous Support, Likely to Achieve Consensus and Readily Implementable to Tier Four – Unanimity of the Project Team to Maintain the Status Quo.

An example of a Tier One recommendation with universal support is the need for an Appeals Process. A Tier Four recommendation, was for Loser Pays which was seen as too controversial and hard to implement.

Published in April 2025, the report of the Project Team was sent to the ICANN Board in the hope that its Consensus Findings, coming from a representative mix of stakeholders, could be adopted, thus nullifying the need for a lengthy and contentious ICANN Review.

A year on and the formal ICANN UDRP Review is no closer. The good work of the Project Team sits largely on the back burner.

Aims of the workshop

At the Annual Conference next month the MARQUES Cyberspace Team is running a Workshop to scrutinise the recommendations of the Project Team, hoping to stir the embers back into life.

The Review will be introduced by Gonzalo Navarro from the WIPO Domain Dispute Center. Small groups will discuss and prioritise the recommendations and present their views back to the room, where ICANN’s Mary Wong, VP of Strategic Policy Management, will be an informed observer.

Following the workshop, the Cyberspace Team intends to write to the ICANN Board asking for the recommendations it supports to be implemented as soon as possible.

If you want to inform policy which can improve the UDRP, debating with experts issues such as whether “a small subsidy drawn from domain registration fees should go towards the UDRP in some fashion”, the Workshop is the place to be.

Nick Wood is Director, Com Laude, Markmonitor Group and a member of the MARQUES Cyberspace Team

All of the workshops at this year’s MARQUES Annual Conference take place on Thursday afternoon. There are six workshops in total, five of which are presented twice – enabling you to attend two different workshops during the afternoon