We have received info from our ISP informing that Melbourne IT require us to pay some extortion or they will deregister our domain name.

Is this legal ? ie. monopolistic control, extorting a fee without provision of service, deregistering a service that was obtained through another party, threatening to deregister without proper notification (ie. we have received no communication whatsoever from Melbourne IT themselves), ......

Have consumer affairs and the department of fair trading been informed of this situation ? Do they have anything to say about it ? If not someone really should raise it, the issue no doubt concerns a lot of net heads but it is also has at its root a number of issues relating to trading practises in Australia.

Wilson Fletcher