National Arbitration Forum to cease credit card and consumer arbitration under agreement.
Just one week after the Minnesota Attorney General filed suit against National Arbitration Forum, the two sides have settled. As part of the agreement, National Arbitration Forum will no longer perform arbitration for credit card and other consumer arbitration.
National Arbitration Forum is one of the two largest arbitrators for domain name disputes under UDRP, but the case did not involve domain arbitration. The company can continue to perform domain name arbitration proceedings.
The Minnesota Attorney General alleged the company performed arbitration for 214,000 consumer and credit card disputes in 2006. Pulling out of this market must be a big hit to the company, but the company claims that consumer disputes aren’t a good business anymore, citing increasing regulatory pressure and the economy.
National Arbitration Forum did not admit wrongdoing.
Andrew,
Please read Michael Berg’s take on this.
It’s quite disturbing that the NAF is arbitrating domain dispute cases.
Anyone who lost a generic domain thru a NAF decision should really consider pressuring ICANN to have another Arbitrator review the case.
I hope all those credit card consumers who lost their arbitration cases under NAF will
also have recourse to have their cases reviewed.
See MHB’s blog posting at The Domains here:
http://snurl.com/NAFReport
Wow. I did not think NAF would cave that easily and that quickly.
I owned two domain names that contained my last name for about five years. Then a major corporation whose corporate name includes my name (but spelled differently) went after the domain names. You can’t trademark proper names, so there was no trademark.
Although I bought the domain names well before disputes were supposed to go to arbitration, the case went to the NAF. I made a pretty good argument citing all sorts of precident to other NAF rulings, but naturally lost.
As an experiment, using the NAF I then went after another domain name which happened to include one of my registered trademarks. I used the same argument which had been successful against me. Naturally, I lost here too, this argument being complete BS.
Just one more bit of evidence that the NAF favors the big guys (who are likely to bring it more business ).