November will be a month of endless opportunities for online retailers who participate in some of the world’s largest shopping days, including Singles’ Day and Black Friday. Consumers are already planning what they want to buy and there are plenty of websites making predictions about what’s to come and the best deals to look out for. Singles’ Day, originally launched to celebrate being single, became the world’s largest shopping day last year as it hit a record of $25.4 billion in sales. Black Friday is still the largest shopping day in the U.S. with sales of $5 billion in 2017. As... Read More

Jane Sunderland, of Sunderlaw Strategies, Inc., never imagined that studying biological evolution would someday lead her down a road to data analysis in online protection. But she joined the MarkMonitor Forum as a speaker on that very topic last week. Juxtaposing it with the an ever-developing intellectual property industry, she explained: “It’s about figuring out what the data has to say about trends,” she said. “There have been a lot of changes.” Among those changes – the fact that online protection challenges now span more business departments and industries than ever. In fact, a MarkMonitor report, slated for release this October,... Read More

GDPR has impacted all areas of business, but for brand protection professionals and those concerned with protecting intellectual property rights, the consequences have been tremendous. No longer able to view domain registrant contact information for IP enforcement efforts, law enforcement and brand protection professionals need to seek alternative methods for finding information necessary to identify copyright and trademark infringers. So when faced with a lack of access to critical information from the WHOIS database and data privacy issues around GDPR, brand owners should revise methods within their traditional three-step approach which includes investigation, identification and enforcement. A toolkit for brand owners... Read More

The SSL saga continues. Security certificates are becoming increasingly more important for establishing trust as more users transact online. Threats of online identity theft and fraud have led consumers and business partners to demand assurance that personal, financial and business data remains safe. New changes in internet standards and web browsers are giving websites that use HTTPS a leg up and are actively distrusting unsecure sites that remain on HTTP. Mid-October will herald the release of Firefox 63 and Chrome 70. As a result, users who visit websites with missing or outdated SSL certificates will be greeted with security warnings. Managing... Read More

The new gTLD program has been a controversial topic for MarkMonitor customers. Many understandably blame new gTLDs for inflating defensive domain name budgets, creating new environments for cybersquatters and other bad actors and creating new free speech challenges to brand protection with the introduction of gripe TLDs like .sucks. On the other hand, companies have capitalized on the opportunity to secure powerful keyword-rich and hyper-localized domains, like spanish.academy and toureiffel.paris, and have reached new customers with non-Latin character IDNs. Many companies also now enjoy unprecedented security, innovation and control with their own .brand TLD. For better or for worse, new gTLDs... Read More