Global E-Commerce: Australia - Early History Of Internet Usage

The Australian Overseas Telecommunications Commission created an international dial-up service in the mid-1970s that allowed a few Australians to connect to ARPANet, a U.S. Department of Defense network that proved to be the predecessor of the Internet. At roughly the same time, the Australian Computer Science Network (ACSNet), a modem-based network using the Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP), was developed by computer science professors at the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney. It was in the early 1980s that Australia put in place a permanent e-mail connection to ARPANet. A few years later, an e-mail gateway was added to ACSNet. ACSNet's storing, forwarding, and transferring features allowed Australia's computer scientists to engage in many of the same technologies, such as e-mail and file transfer protocol (FTP), that had recently been embraced by their colleagues around the world. Ironically, it was the success of this early network that many industry analysts blamed "for Australian computer scientists gaining access to the Internet about 5 years later than they should have," wrote Roger Clarke in May of 2001.

Efforts to expand network access to non-computer science areas of academia resulted in the creation of the South Pacific Education and Research Network (SPEARNet) by the Australian Vice-Chancellor's Committee (AVCC). In the late 1980s, work began on the creation of a national network for data, voice, and fax services. Eventually, this project evolved into what became known as the Australian Academic & Research Network (AARNet), which was officially launched in 1990 as an Internet protocol (IP) network without voice or fax capabilities. Like SPEARNet, AARNet was operated by AVCC. Melbourne University helped to oversee the development of Pegasus Networks, an early Internet Service Provider (ISP) that granted international Internet access via a connection to AARNet, in 1991. Within a year, several thousand Australians signed up for the service. Also in 1992, the Australian Public Access Network Association was created to offer hosting services to a growing number of bulletin boards and newsgroups; it eventually evolved into a noncommercial Internet access provider. The Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre, which was created in 1993, began to oversee IP address registration in the Asia-Pacific region shortly after its formation. That year, ARPANet decreed that acceptable use of the Internet could be expanded beyond research-oriented endeavors; this decision proved to be a major milestone in the transformation of the Internet into a commercial medium.

The advent of the World Wide Web sparked increased demand for Internet access across the globe. To better facilitate the growth of the Internet market in Australia, AARNet decided to implement a Value Added Reseller (VAR) program, through which it would allow ISPs to connect to its Internet backbone for a fee based on usage. In May of 1994, connect.com .au became the first ISP to sign up for the VAR program. That year, iinet Technologies, based in Perth, also began offering dial-up connections to the Internet. Australia's public telephone company, Telstra, launched its own ISP the following year. According to Clarke, "In mid-1995, AVCC transferred its commercial customers, associated assets, and the management of interstate and international links to Telstra. Telstra thereby acquired the whole of the infrastructure that at that stage constituted 'the Internet in Australia."' Many analysts, including Clarke, believe that Telstra's sluggishness in responding to the demands of Internet growth worked to hinder the development of an Internet infrastructure, and thus e-commerce, on the continent. "During 1994-97, the international linkage represented a serious bottleneck, but gradually Telstra started releasing additional capacity at something closer to the rate at which demand was growing."