Peter Gerrand wrote:

> > 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.

But this IS the threat.

You clearly threaten that if you don't pay up, your out.

You clearly state above, in your reply to Paul Montgomery, that a holder
of a .com.au domain name must "paying those fees or risk having their
DNS deleted from our Zone Files."

Explain to me how this is not a threat, when these victims have no other
.com.au registry to turn to.