You can be sure I’m not describing anything above the small-claims level of our court system. But I am describing a private, dispute resolution option. The National Arbitration Forum.

Back when I came up with the name Provanta for my company, back in about 1999, that domain was already registered to some electric company as a brand name for one of the services they provided to commercial clients. So, I registered provantacorp.com, and provanta.biz later, when .biz came available (it seems to have never caught on, and that’s a shame, in my view). I wasn’t watching closely enough, and the electric company dropped the product, and let their domain expire around the end of last year. Now, had it been picked up by someone for an unrelated service I’d have just let it go, but I was tooling around a couple of months ago, and what do I find (that’ll only go to that "debt help" site for another couple of weeks)? Some company in Korea registered the domain, and from the nature of the site clearly knew what they were going to do with it (poach business with my name).

At any rate, the fee was about $1,300, took about 2 months from start to finish, and now the domain will be transfered to us and I never had to contact "the authorities."

Here’s the logically laid out argument and decision (PDF). This ought to be the future of dispute resolution to every possible extent.