Affected by the epidemic, people have tended to consume on online e-commerce or mobile commerce in recent years. The progress in communication technology have led to the rise of long-distance communication transactions. Consumers seem to have more options for trading than traditional brick-and-mortar transactions such as markets or stores. However, if the operator sells the goods or services over a long distance, the consumer can only unilaterally accept the information that the operator has informed of . The information status between consumers and business operators is extremely unbalanced. The consumer disputes are endless.
According to the statistics of the Consumer Protection Department of the Executive Yuan in the past two years, consumer disputes such as online shopping platforms or mobile business have increased year by year. It shows that the consumer controversy of communication transactions should be taken seriously. In addition, consumer disputes are one type of civil disputes. The way to handle civil disputes concludes court mediation and litigation. The kind of consumer disputes involves generally in low amount of money as well as single case type and a large caseload. It is clear that the traditional mechanism of the dispute resolution can no longer meet the needs. The operators and consumers are not equal. The cost to resolve the dispute is much more than the amount in dispute. The consumers are unwilling to resolve disputes. It leads to consumer’s distrust in the communications trading market and difficulties of this industrial development. It is very important for consumer protection to discuss the legal system and to explore new methods of dispute resolution .
The research direction of this paper is to discuss the method and development of communication transactions in the consumer protection legal system and the dispute resolution mechanism of communication transactions. First of all, we have to know the particularity of communication transactions and the reasons that are prone to disputes are that the information of both parties to the transaction is not equal. We also explore the issue of "balance of information status" in terms of protection methods and bring out two models of user protection for communication transactions. In addition to introducing the legislation and amendments to the two models in Taiwan's consumer protection law, we compare and analyze the differences between the consumer protection laws of the EUROPEAN Union and China in communication transaction.
Taiwan's mechanism of consumer dispute resolution is mainly based on the court litigation and mediation, the mediation by township and municipal offices and the mediation by consumer protection law. Compared to the lengthy litigation procedures required for court litigation mediation, the mediation of township and urban public offices and the mediation of the appeal under the Consumer Protection Law are relatively simple. However, the mediation of the appeal requires the parties to negotiate face-to-face at a physical meeting (ADR procedure). It still requires time and cost for both parties to deal with their dispute. Therefore, the internationally developed mechanism of online dispute resolution (ODR) is expected to use communication technology to settle disputes on an equal footing with communication transactions. And to promote the willingness of both parties to resolve disputes. Foreign legal references including the European Union's ODR regulations and the US non-governmental and government-based online dispute resolution platforms have certain reference values in the design of online dispute resolution systems.
