Daniel points to the arisal of 'Robot agents' to manage arbitration proceedings:
"Robot agents digest all the information and make proposals to the parties. Once the arbitrator is agreed upon, the robot agent finds a suitable meeting date for everybody," said Jacques Gouimenou, managing director of Tiga Technologies, the company behind e-Dispute, speaking with ElectricNews.Net. "Our system reduces delays and costs. It is also very secure."
As far as I can tell from the article, the author got it wrong as the agent does not do the arbitration itself. What the robot does is to automate or facilitate the case management process in an arbitration, which includes for example selecting the arbitrator. Once that is done, the arbitrator takes charge. Certainly a valuable service, but it should be borne in mind that it is unlikely that a robot could ever arbitrate human disputes (c.f., smart contracts).
Some other quick scattered but old notes. Arbitration is starting to make its mark in small dispute resolution over the net. See The Cheese Dreams case and also WikiPedia's Arbitration Committee.
In IP news a while back, Google won a typosquatting case (link lost) in the arbitration forums. What's news here is the appropriateness of using Arbitration for Internet disputes - see the use by WebMoney which has extended the basic model that was written but never used by e-gold.
Daniel also wrote a while back:
... the most popular russian auction site at http://www.molotok.ru/ which is somewhat affiliated with WebMoney (they use the same arbitration service run by WM). PayPal/eBay refuse to do business in Russia because of the high levels of fraud and the slow and largely ineffective court system. WM's design is sound enough to accomodate for all that; their fraud levels are actually lower than those in PayPal (for obvious reasons; from a technical point of view, WM is far more secure). I'm wondering how money@mail.ru is hoping to survive with their password-based security and no arbitration service.Posted by iang at January 9, 2006 10:49 AM | TrackBack
This is not Arbitration from a strict standpoint but rather a limited set of alternatives based on a complaint by one of two parties a Secretary for Complaints if you will. This is truly News Speak for the modern age and something CRM application vendors do constantly. The art of the fake automation of human interaction has created more issues to solve that it fixes. Now the concept of an arbitration agent in an adversarial system has merit via an automated complaint driven monitor could make havoc of sluggish and non-responsive bureaucratic entity but it has to choose sides does it become the nimble entity of the consumer to arbitrage the excess capital or inefficient service delivery of a government entity? I like the idea that a robot has to work for something, some goal, an objective. This e-Dispute works for Governmental Organizations and is sponsored by those that look for excuses rather than accountability. If a robot had any functionality beyond providing an automated excuse for a governmental entity then it might warrant some merit but aiding and assisting in fabrication of poor service delivery and the theft of taxpayers dollars is something governments do perfectly well without automation. The suggested resolutions are all drafted by the government who owns the system. So where are the consumer based resolutions robots that governmental entities must agree to use for resolutions and can the taxpayer’s bot have tea with the government’s bot and chat things over? The killer bot idea scan all news items for corporate public entities and correlate the factual truthfulness of based on what was said previously and by whom. This same bot with a little bit of funding could be turned on Government read the laws and determine if the statements and implementations are in fact in accord with the contract implied by electoral mandate or not. The Government Bot would automate the immediate call for selective no confidence votes and recalls of elected members based on the violation of the public trust. So the Grand Master Bot would run bots in all the areas of portfolio based upon established rules and would also perform predictive analysis and determine if a potential elected official might be likely to violate the public trust and render from this analysis derive a suitability list. I might feel better if we where in the case of e-Dispute to call the application a hired government assassin.
Posted by: Jimbo at January 9, 2006 07:43 AM