21st-Century Trend: Solving Conflicts on the Internet
Byline: Lindsay Kines
Source: Victoria Times
In the pre-Internet world of John Wayne, when men were men and online referred to a hooked fish, people settled their disputes face to face in a courthouse or on a dusty street.
Nowadays, they're more likely to meet Facebook to Facebook.
As the world economy changes and more people conduct business over the Internet, disputes increasingly get resolved on the information highway instead of main street at high noon.
The rapidly growing field of online dispute resolution, which is the focus of a two-day forum in Victoria this week, now tackles everything from battles between states to disagreements between buyers and sellers on eBay, said Frank Fowlie, an ombudsman for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
"If you've bought something from me and you live in Australia, I live in Canada, and we've used eBay that's based in the United States, it could be a very complicated system legally to work through that," Fowlie said. Online mediation and arbitration systems, however, allow the aggrieved parties to reach agreements that save time, money, and often relationships, he said.
"It's taking off," Fowlie said. "We're starting to see courts in different parts of the world use online systems to manage small claims. We're starting to see a lot of corporations using it as a mechanism to deal with their clients."
Colin Rule, director of online dispute resolution for eBay and PayPal, said it's a phenomenon driven by advances in technologies and the young people who use them.
"You have older generations who don't really get technology: 'Why would anybody try to resolve a dispute over instant messaging? That seems ridiculous!' But the younger generation is constantly on their phones and constantly on Facebook, and they expect that they're going to use those channels to achieve resolution."
Eventually, Rule said, it will be commonplace "for people to say, 'You know what? Why don't we just meet online?' Click. One p.m. Talk with someone over your computer. It will be the same thing as driving across town to meet with them."
That's not to say that brick courthouses will become an obsolete venue for resolving disputes, he said.
"We'll always have the big courthouses, but they might be less utilized in the future. We might fit them out with HDTVs."