The Next Challenge: Evolving Your Organization

The new reality: brands are under attack from every direction. The next challenge: corporations must evolve their organizations to meet this ever-changing threat landscape. Fraudsters have seen that brands drive business—big business. They have evolved their tactics to take advantage, leveraging brands in new and surprising ways, across multiple

online mediums, adopting sophisticated and proven business models. These new targeted, multi-faceted attacks demand that corporations employ a holistic approach to protect their valuable brands online.

The good news: the technology to combat brand attacks has improved significantly. Our own Brand Protection Platform scours virtually every corner of the Internet. Enforcement mechanisms now include preventative measures such as brandcasting, which gives brandholders the unique ability to steer customers away from potentially fraudulent or unauthorized sites. Perhaps the most significant improvement is the complete view that corporations now have of the brand abuse challenges they face. Through a single, integrated platform, organizations can now understand the totality of their problem and take concerted action across the enterprise.

As brand attacks and technology have evolved, so must organizations. Brand abuse is not a legal problem or an IT problem, but a business problem. As such, corporations must take a strategic, holistic approach to effectively address this new and growing threat. No longer can organizations act in silos—they must develop cross-functional resources to effectively address this fundamental business concern. Leadership must extend from the C-suite as brand abuse strikes at the core of a corporation’s value—reputation and customer trust.
If you’d like to hear more on evolving your corporation in the face of new threats, please watch my video, by clicking here. To view a transcript of the video, click here.

Kind Regards,

Irfan Salim,
President & CEO, MarkMonitor

ICANN UPDATE

March Mexico City Meeting

ICANN's meeting in Mexico City this month represented an important shift in direction for brand rights holder issues. All the work that the IP Community—including ICANN’s IP Constituency, our customers, concerned companies, organizations and individuals who commented on the draft applicant guidebook as well as MarkMonitor—paid dividends.

The argument has been successfully shifted from the expense and pain suffered by brand rights holders to the damage caused to consumers from brand abuse and the negative effect this abuse has on security and confidence in the Internet. As a result, the board and staff of ICANN identified overarching issues that affect the introduction of new gTLDs. The cornerstone issue is brand abuse in the domain name system.

The ICANN board put “their money where their mouth is” by agreeing to fund travel for a panel of experts to create a fair and scalable set of rights protection mechanisms to be integrated into the new gTLD program. The proposal for these mechanisms is slated to be reviewed by the board and staff before and during the Sydney meeting in June.

As a result, there is an assumption that a schedule change for the introduction of new gTLDs will occur. Why? There will be at least two more versions of the Applicant Guidebook and supporting materials which drives the program’s launch to “the end of this year or early next” at the very earliest according to ICANN staff statements at the Mexico City meeting. With the comment period on the second version of the Applicant Guidebook and supporting materials open until April 13, 2009, we encourage those concerned with brand rights holder issues to comment further.

There were many other issues discussed at the meeting. To get more information please feel free to view our recent webinar.

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MarkMonitor solutions are protected by US patent rights, including US 7,346,605.  Other patents pending.