Out-of-court dispute resolution policy in EU electronic commerce

The idea of common electronic market in European Union is frequent question in many aspects. From the legal point of view it is necessary to define unfair competition in this field. It includes domain name grabbing, cybersquatting, spamming and other ways of disrupting competitor’s activities. Legal regulation of e-commerce is developing very slowly but we have already achieved some victories. Directive on certain legal aspects of information society, in particular electronic commerce, in Internal Market (2000) was followed by the regulation of .eu domain names (2002, 2004) and others. This paper is focusing on out-ofcourt dispute resolution policy in EU electronic commerce, especially includes the way of so called Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) in .eu domain name cases. It presents results of research of more then 200 ADR decisions made by The Czech Arbitration Court which is the only arbitration board within European Union authorized to solve .eu domain name disputes and it is able to administer ADR in all official European Union languages.Alternative dispute resolution, bad faith, complainant, Czech Arbitration Court, cybersquatting, domain name, electronic market, legitimate interest, unfair competition