Paul Montgomery wrote:
...
> 
> I am including the story I wrote on the issue for this Friday's CW
> below.  People here might be interested, as it mentions events on these
> lists.  I hope there aren't too many glaring factual errors! Famous last
> words? :-)
> 

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.   
  
> 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.  

PG
-- 
Professor Peter Gerrand
CEO, Melbourne IT