Verizon has filed a lawsuit against Melbourne, Australia based domain parking company Above.com, its parent company Trellian and several of its key employees for cybersquatting and contributory cybersquatting. Verizon is seeking an immediate transfer of the domain names and damages worth at least $1.83 million (based on $100,000 per domain name infringement plus attorneys’ fees).

Verizon alleges the defendants used false identities to register, use or provide WHOIS privacy protection for more than 183 domain names that infringed Verizon’s trademarks. These include such domain names as verizonprepaidphone.com, vewrizonwireless.com and vierizon.net.

Well-known domain name investor, Rick Schwartz, has published a volcanic blog post, accusing domain name registrar Moniker and its parent company Oversee.net of covering up an incident in which an employee allegedly and wrongfully accessed a Moniker customer’s account.

According to Rick Schwartz’s latest blog post and an earlier post published in December last year a former employee of Moniker wrongfully accessed a Moniker customer’s account and then contacted the customer’s employer about the domain name. Apparently, the domain name was derogatory towards the employer.

Instructing people to register a trademark-infringing domain name may be just as unlawful as registering a domain name that infringes someone’s trademark, according to a ruling by U.S. Federal Judge Ricardo Martinez.

Judge Martinez has found in favor of Microsoft in its lawsuit against Internet marketing ‘gurus’ Amish Shah, Jose A. Rivera a.k.a. Jay Styles and their related corporations Digispace Solutions LLC and YMultimedia LLC.

Having a keyword rich domain name is NOT be the be-all and end-all. After all, Google, Bing and Yahoo! don’t have ‘search engine’ in their domain names. At the same time, we’ve found that, all else being equal, a domain name containing the keywords you’re targeting for the search engines beats a more generic domain name for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

Now, let me stress that ‘all else being equal’ may NOT apply. For instance, Kikabink News currently ranks pretty highly for ‘Internet marketing blog’ in Google, and there’s no ‘Internet marketing blog’ in our domain name.

Domainer Income has just reported that one of Australia’s major energy companies, TRUenergy let the premium domain name, electricity.com.au expire. Given that electricity.com.au just sold at auction for $30,933… that’s at least $30,933 the energy giant has just kissed goodbye (and probably more considering the strategic value of an energy company owning such a domain).

Hey, even if TRUenergy didn’t want to keep the domain name… surely they would have sold it… not just let it expire.

Is this another case of a large corporation failing to manage its domain name portfolio? Just a few weeks ago huge Australian company Wesfarmers – which owns the leading hardware chain, Bunnings – let the premium domain name hardware.com.au expire. In that case, Wesfarmers’ arch-rival Woolworths picked up the domain name for $33,333 and was reportedly willing to pay up to $100,000 to acquire it.

One of the biggest myths in domain investment is that you can’t make money from parking. Yeah, right. The reality is that you can make impressive returns from parking.

Of course, you may well be able to generate higher returns from building out websites… and parking does carry the problem of traffic – and income – attrition over time… But with tools such as KeyRPM on the market, there are certainly ways to optimize your parking revenue.

As a domain name owner or investor, the last thing you want to receive is a nasty lawyer’s letter demanding that you give up your domain name because it infringes some company’s trademark.

The good news is that if you use Domainer Income when evaluating domain names to buy, you’ll now be able to check whether or not your domain name matches a registered trademark.

What happens when big companies forget to renew great domain names? The same thing that happens when small businesses and individuals fail to renew great domain names. They lose them… and sometimes to their arch rivals!

Last week, major Australian retailer Wesfarmers and owner of the major hardware chain Bunnings forgot to renew ‘hardware.com.au’. That’s right, they FORGOT to renew it.

In the three months ended September 2010, the global base of top level domain names (TLDs) reached a huge 201.8 million domain name registrations. TLDs grew by 3.8 million domain names (2 percent) over the second quarter and by 13.3 million (7 percent) over the third quarter of last year.

According to VeriSign’s third quarter ‘Domain Name Industry Brief’, the base of Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) reached 79.2 million domain names, growing by 1.4 percent over Q2 2010 and by 2.4 percent over Q3 2009.

Data from Domainer Income reveals that the top domain name parking sites all saw marginal increases in the number of domain names hosted on their platforms in November 2010.

DomainSponsor grew the most – from 1.67 million domain names to 1.85 million during the month, an increase of just under 1 percent. Sedo saw its parked domain names rise from 1.3 million to 1.57 million and Fabulous saw its portfolio rise from 476,970 domain names to 548,808 parked domain names during the month.

Here are the top eight (8) parking companies and the number of parked domain names in November 2010 according to Domainer Income: