Again, I apologise for wasting other people's time and disk space with
this message, but I am forced to reply.

Peter Gerrand wrote:
> Paul
> There are indeed some significant errors in your CW article, and as this
> is the subject of a Federal Court action we are defending, it is
> important that I correct them immediately. To save readers' time, I will
> only quote the relevant sections of your report. Most of the rest of
> your report is reasonably accurate, if selective.  - PG
> 
> > Last Thursday Melbourne IT, the administrator for the "com.au" domain -
> > the Web address space for local firms - was the subject of a Federal
> > Court lawsuit by a potential competitor, iiNet Technologies.
> > Melbourne IT has been asking companies with Web addresses suffixed with
> > "com.au" to renew their site names, for a fee of up to $125, or have
> > their sites removed from the Web.
> 
> Of course we have not asked or threatened companies to remove their
> sites from the Web. We asked the holders of com.au domain names to pay a
> fee for our service of supporting their DNs on our Primary Name Server,
> and gave three months' notice of the deadline for paying those fees or
> risk having their DNS deleted from our Zone Files.

I suppose it is a matter of a half-empty or half-full glass.  The last
sentence of the above paragraph does not (I hope) directly impute that
the *only* reason that you asked for the money was to avoid deletion.  I
can not, you would understand, spell out the full implications of every
snippet of information in a news article. Journalists have only so much
space to tell our story, and we have to dissolve a myriad facts down to
essential information.  I would love to have the room to really go into
these issues more deeply, and in next week's edition I will in a feature
I'll be writing (though I don't think I'll be posting it to these
mailing lists!).

> > Professor Peter Gerrand, CEO of Melbourne IT, claimed that the industry
> > had approved his company's policy at the January meeting of the DNS
> > Forum, a meeting of stakeholders in the industry held by the industry
> > representative body Internet Industry Association of Australia (IntIAA).
> 
> I have never claimed that the January 17 meeting of the DNS Forum
> approved our renewal policy; that particular meeting approved our
> proposals for reforming the com.au Naming Policy (which were then
> implemented on 24 February).
> What I have claimed, and continue to claim, is that the DNS Forum has
> approved our Pricing Policy, which explicitly included the renewal fees;
> and for your information, that approval specifically occurred at the DNS
> Forum public forum meeting in the Melbourne Exhibition Centre on 25
> October 1996.

I did not know that, and I am now suitably informed.  Thankyou. 
However, I think it is slightly disingenuous for you to claim the
approval of the DNS Forum due to their support at a meeting six months
ago (two whole Internet years!), when a meeting two months ago was
strenuously opposed to the policy.  I had assumed that when you were
gauging support, you were referring to the events at the latest meeting
which, by any stretch of the imagination, would be a fair approximation
of the sentiment of its members.  I apologise for making this wrong
assumption, but I don't think I can be hung for it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Montgomery, Internet Journalist for Computer Week - APN Computing
E: monty§apnpc.com.au    Ph: +61 2 9936 8793    Fax: +61 2 9955 8871
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