The DR-CAFTA agreement, in Article 15.4 Domain Names on the Internet requires that the parties provide, for their respective ccTLDs:

an appropriate procedure for the settlement of disputes based on the principles established in the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

For those of you who don’t know, a ‘ccTLD’ is the Top Level Domain name (TLD) based on the individual nation’s country code (cc). A TLD is the last part of any domain name, i.e. the ‘.com’, ‘.uk’ or ‘.eu’. Individual countries have control over how their own ccTLD is administered, and this Article requires parties to use a specific method of resolving domain name disputes — the UDRP developed by ICANN.
The ‘UDRP-like’ requirement is in other FTAs involving the United States:

• Chile-US in Article 17.3
• Singapore-US in Article 16.3
• Australia-US in Article 17.3

In addition, a UDRP requirement can be found in the drafts of the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement.

In the course of conducting my research, I haven’t run across much in the way of legal academic work examing the proliferation of the UDRP in the FTA context. Searches in the UK and US Westlaw databases (UK-JLR & TP-ALL), and on the general web, have turned up few mentions of the subject. This looks like at least one area that will come out of this project as being identified for further research.

Follow up posts on this issue to come.