Brian Retkin of domain registrar Dotworlds had been criticized for offering .USA domains for sale and spamming people with sales pitches after September 11, 2001. He has claimed Google’s links to this criticism amounts to defamation.

March was a busy month for lawsuits involving bloggers and webmasters. The court system taking them to task for defamatory statements, with one case becoming the first to go to trial and result in a liability verdict.

A legal system once tentative about taking on digital cases is braving the waters with more frequency. Most of the cases we’ve reported on have involved the statements of anonymous commentators, liability for which webmasters and bloggers have been repeatedly exonerated (or are expected to be). But these are different.