The INTA Annual Meeting remains the most concentrated gathering of the global intellectual property community, bringing together brand owners, trademark law firms and technology providers in one place.
This year’s event in London marked our third time attending INTA and one thing is clear: the conversation around brand protection is evolving and moving earlier.
Here are some of the key themes we heard through conversations at our booth and across the conference.
The Questions Have Changed
In previous years, many conversations have centered on awareness – understanding the scope of domain-based abuse and what options exist. This year, the questions were more advanced.
Brand protection teams and their advisors were asking how to reduce the time between identifying a threat and acting on it. Increasingly, they want to manage risk across an expanding domain namespace without expanding their teams, and they need to balance the cost of protection against the cost of enforcement.
The underlying message was consistent across almost every discussion: reactive approaches are under real pressure. Takedowns and litigation remain part of the toolkit, but as abuse scales and accelarates, they’re increasingly expensive and slow compared to the risk they address.
Who We Spoke With
One of the things that makes INTA valuable is the range of people in the room. Across our conversations, three groups came up consistently.
Law firms were well represented — and their role is changing. Because they work across multiple client portfolios, they're often the first to spot patterns and identify where traditional approaches are falling short.
In-house brand and IP teams were more actively involved in evaluating solutions than in previous years. There's real pressure on these teams to reduce operational burden and bring legal, security, and digital functions into closer alignment.
Registries, registrars and technology providers were also part of the conversation; a sign that brand protection is increasingly seen as an infrastructure challenge, not just an enforcement one.
What The Industry Is Telling Us
A few themes came through clearly across our discussions.
Prevention is replacing reaction as the primary goal. Organizations aren’t just asking how to respond to abuse faster, they’re asking how to stop it before it happens. That means intervening earlier and thinking about protection at the infrastructure level, not just case by case.
Domain abuse is a broader concern than it used to be. Phishing, spoofing and impersonation came up in nearly every conversation, but teams aren’t treating these as isolated IP issues anymore. They’re cybersecurity risks and consumer trust problems, and that’s changing who’s involved in the decisions and how urgently they’re acted on.
Scale is putting pressure on traditional models. As the domain namespace expands and threats move faster, many teams are struggling to maintain consistent protection without expanding resources to match. Manual, reactive workflows aren’t keeping up.
What This Means For The BSA
The conversations we had at INTA 2026 reinforced something we hear consistently: the industry wants to get ahead of abuse, not just respond to it.
That’s where the BSA focuses its work. We bring together brands, registries and industry partners to develop practical ways to reduce abuse before it starts. The message from London was clear: the market is ready to act.
We look forward to sharing more insights from the brand protection and IP community. If you’d like to share your thoughts or get in touch, reach us at hello[@]brandsafetyalliance.co.
Tony Kirsch
