Legal Nature of Online Arbitration and Its Relationship with Traditional Arbitration

The paper attempts to define the legal nature of online arbitration and its relationship with traditional arbitration. It questions whether online arbitration constitutes arbitration by its legal nature or represents dispute resolution procedures lacking arbitration characteristics. The conducted analysis shows that classifying nonarbitral procedures as “online arbitration” is unjustified from legal-technical and formal-logical perspectives; only procedures meeting core arbitration features qualify. The paper examines the problem of distinguishing online arbitration from traditional arbitration. Through instrumental and qualitative approaches to the role of digital technologies, it is noted that deep digital integration qualitatively transforms dispute resolution in online arbitration, creating phenomena absent in traditional arbitration. These phenomena change the nature of arbitration proceedings and serve as a distinctive feature that allows us to distinguish between online arbitration and traditional arbitration.