Up to half of .info domain name registrations could be fraudulent, warn lawyers.

There are serious legal doubts about 10 per cent to 50 per cent of .info domain registrations, says Jonathan Armstrong, online commerce lawyer for law firm Eversheds.

And the arbitration process will face severe pressures trying to decide the rightful owners.

Armstrong is advising companies to go straight to the courts if they want a quick resolution of any domain-name disputes.

Legal action will put further strain on Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the registry organisations assigning domains.

Last week .info registry Afilias admitted it was launching an investigation into the bogus registration of several highly marketable domain names.

It says that domain name speculators, or cybersquatters, had been using false trademarks to register top-level domains.

Afilias chief marketing officer Roland LaPlante admits the company doesn't have an effective way of checking trademark validity.

"It's not possible for us to verify all the information on a real-time basis as the registrations come in. There is no authoritative global source of standardised trademark data to allow us to do a database-to-database check," he said.

And .biz registry Neulevel has a suit in a Californian court to clear its name, following a threatening letter by Amazon.com accusing it of running an illegal lottery for domain name allocations.

Icann and its chairman Vinton Cerf were unavailable for comment.