MarkMonitor have released their Summer 2008 Brandjacking Index, reporting that brandjackers increasingly abuse top-ranked pharmaceutical brands. This abuse, they say, endangers consumers via a supply chain compromised by the sale of questionable prescription drugs through dubious online pharmacies and exchange sites. The report also found that cybersquatting of leading brands has reached an all-time high and that phishers are targeting an increased number of diverse organizations for the first time. … more

Nominet, the registry for .uk (United Kingdom) domain names, has announced there are now seven million .uk domain names registered. This follows the recent announcement of .org also passing seven million names. .Uk is the third largest ccTLD, with both .cn (China) and .de (Germany) both having over 12 million domain name registrations. … more

Is Dot-mobi doomed? That’s the question asked in a recent article in ClickZ Network who say the gTLD “lived a brief (and not particularly productive) life.” The article suggests “the iPhone killed it.” … more

Hot-Or-Not Domains Appraisal Contest Grand Prize Winning Domain: “Discover.Asia”

DotAsia Organisation announced today the successful completion of the .Asia Sunrise and Landrush auctions. Domains receiving multiple qualified applications in the respective Sunrise and Landrush phases were allocated through an auction system. The process proved to be a vast improvement of the dispute ridden pure first-come-first-served approach, and has provided a strong foundation for growth for the .Asia domain. … more

A registrant who registered 26 domain names with Wild West Domains, Melbourne IT’s Internet Names Worldwide and GoDaddy containing “googler” such as businessgoogler.com and cargoogler.com has lost a UDRP complaint. The decision said the domain names were registered in bad faith. … more

Internet Community at the Forefront of Online Collaboration, Social Issues, Advocacy, and Social Networking Reaches Significant Milestone

.ORG, The Public Interest Registry, the registry behind the global .ORG domain name, announced today that more than 7 million domain names are now registered as .ORG, making it the third largest generic domain (after .com and .net). Since management of the registry was assumed by Public Interest Registry in 2003, .ORG registrations have increased more than 250%. … more

Fresh from being awarded his most recent Peabody award, back in June Stephen Colbert interviewed Jonathan Zittrain who wants to save the good chaos of the Internet and separate it from the bad chaos that will stomp on everything. … more

Following the progress on the IDN TLD allocation processes during the ICANN meeting in Paris a new area has been made available to describe IDN policy development and IDN ccTLD allocation developments under ICANN’s IDN Area: http://icann.org/en/topics/idn. … more

A seminar and cocktail party sponsored by Melbourne law firm Cooper Mills Lawyers to discuss the .au domain name space, wildcarding and the implications for .au with special guest Ehud Gavron will be held on Tuesday September 2. … more

Officials at Lemon Sponge Cake Contemporary Ballet in Boulder were shocked to discover recently that their Web site had disappeared off the face of the Internet.

“We had bought the domain name from NameSecure, which is kind of ironic,” said Jenifer Sher, the ballet company’s executive director. “I guess it must have expired, but we didn’t receive any renewal notices.”

… more

A series of regional consultative meetings about crucial changes to ICANN will take place over the next three months in an effort to reach out to and involve the organization’s global stakeholders. … more

More than 90 percent of EURid´s registrars who responded to a recent survey are satisfied or more than satisfied with the support they receive from EURid via email and telephone and rate EURid’s responsiveness as satisfactory or very satisfactory. Also the registration system functions well according to the survey, and the vast majority, 86 percent, see no need for improvement. … more

The work to create a community travel support procedure began with a specific call for travel support in late 2007 by some in the community (though this issue has been discussed for some time). There has been extensive consultation on community travel support. It began as a workshop in Delhi, with comments received and an analysis posted. Further, a draft was posted in June, discussed in budget meetings in Paris, and again with fairly extensive comment in person, via email and on the web. These second round of comments were summarized and analyzed. … more

The final report of the Independent Review of the ALAC submitted by Westlake Consulting has been posted today in Arabic, Chinese, French, German and Spanish. (The English original was posted on 25 July 2008.) This final report has been published following consultation on the draft report at the Paris meeting. … more

–Over 200 Domain Names Featured–

Moniker, an Oversee.net company and provider of Domain Asset Management® services, revealed today the premium domain names available at for its exclusive live and extended online auction at the Search Engine Strategies (SES), the high-tech and internet company event of the year. Held at the San Jose Convention Center , the exclusive Moniker live auction is scheduled to start on Wednesday, August 20 at 5:45 p.m. PDT (8:45 p.m. EDT). … more