The Internet - one of the greatest innovations of this or any century, is now crucial to tens of millions of individuals and organizations for commerce and communications. As commercial transactions revolve more and more around the Internet, its reliability and stability is becoming not only more important. More and more companies, individuals and organizations are getting their domain names registered and the latest statistics show that the number of new international registrations totaled 230,000 in the first quarter of the year, up from 168,000 in the previous quarter. The 230,000 represent growth of 135% over the 98,000 international registrations in the first quarter of last year.
The domain names are governed by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which has been established a modicum of legitimacy. The Uniform Dispute Resolution process (UDRP) developed for managing the domain names disputes has made domain name dispute resolution much cheaper and faster than before.
Jon Postel, director of the Internet Assigned Number Authority, which controls the number codes of Internet addresses and also administers the .us domain name, argued in his comments that 200 more generic top-level domains should be created, in addition to the 200-odd country codes now in existence. With the implementation of new Top Level Domains (TLDs) scheduled to take place throughout 2001, we can only expect an increase in the number of domain name dispute arbitration claims.
China, Australia and India have moved into the top 10 foreign countries in domain name registrations for .com., .net and .org, according to Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) in Herndon, Va.
With this increasing number of domain name registrations in India, China and other Asian Countries, there is an urgent need for an ICANN approved Provider in this region.
We at Waqalat intend to apply soon to ICANN for approval as a Provider for Domain Name Disputes. We already have on our Panel, Arbitrators from different Countries who are experts in the Domain Name Disputes and are on the panel of one or more ICANN approved service providers. Also, we being already in the dot com business, very well understand the need for a fast, reliable and technologically advanced service provider for handling such domain name disputes.
We are currently developing standards, procedure, and software required to provide quality services on the basis of the ICANN rules and policies. All these procedures are being developed keeping in mind the total quality movement and the ISO standards. We at Waqalat understand the competitive potential of quality and how it benefits not only the customers but also the organization.
Two points have been kept in mind while formulating process and procedures, which are:
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Careful design of the entire Uniform Dispute Resolution Process keeping in mind the administrative compliance within the organization, technical expertise of the arbitrators and the administrators, the entire clerical process, and documentation as per the guidelines of UNCITRAL, ICANN and ISO.
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Ensuring that the Center’s systems can consistently produce and follow the same in totality.
We at Waqalat believe that Quality must be worked at and consciously achieved.
Naval Bhatia
CEO
