Online Dispute Resolution for Consumers in the European Union (repost)

E-commerce offers immense challenges to traditional dispute resolution methods, as it entails parties often located in different parts of the world making contracts with each other at the click of a mouse. The use of traditional litigation for disputes arising in this forum is often inconvenient, impractical, time-consuming and expensive due to the low value of the transactions and the physical distance between the parties. Thus modern legal systems face a crucial choice: either to adopt traditional dispute resolution methods that have served the legal systems well for hundreds of years or to find new methods which are better suited to a world not anchored in territorial borders.