[LINK] Happy birthday .au

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Hi Tom,

Forgot to reference this news item. This article in question does seem
a little odd, in that it's from an ISP's subscriber splash page, and it
doesn't credit any particular writer or author. What that means in terms
of it's accuracy or veracity one cannot say, and so you may well be right.

<http://www.optuszoo.com.au/news/technology/news-com-au/australia-
celebrates-25-years-of/371859> 

> Stephen, not sure who wrote this, but there are a few inaccuracies and
> unfortunately I must make comment...
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> > [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of 
> > stephen at melbpc.org.au
> > Sent: Saturday, 4 June 2011 4:33 PM
> > To: link at anu.edu.au
> > Cc: oz-teachers at rite.ed.qut.edu.au
> > Subject: [LINK] Happy birthday .au
> > 
> > 
> > Australia celebrates 25 years of Au
> > 
> > Jun 03, 2011 6:13am 
> > 
> > IT'S something close to almost all our hearts, with Aussies 
> > clocking the 
> > highest per capita use in the world, and it's turning 25.
> 
> 
> I believe several countries are ahead of us. If we count the people that
> have a computer at home, at school or have access to a computer at home
> and at school, (Please Refer helpful References below) then we rate in
> the top ten (varies between number 4-7).
> Countries like Ireland are way ahead of us on active mobile phone
> accounts per capita.
> 
> > It is 25 years since the .au domain name came into being, sparking a 
> > revolution to which Australia succumbed with more enthusiasm than any 
> > nation on earth - or, presumably, in cyberspace.
> 
> Only because a bunch of Entrepreneurs refused to believe that Telecom
> didn't want to sell anything else except copper (Quote) and were forced
> into financial difficulties when Telecom changed the charging from 2
> cents per megabyte to 19 cents per megabyte thereby sending nearly 200
> of them broke and into administration, where a friendly Telecom
> chequebook was waiting to pay the liquidators fees to pick up the ISP
> customer bases.
> 
> >
> > Australia has some 10.4 million active internet users and a 
> > further 4.2 
> > million wireless broadband users, the highest rate per capita in the 
> > world.
> > 
> 
> Source Please. Err, that's not the data I have.
> 
> For example: to call waiting for a two minute timeout in North Sydney is
> not what I would call Broadband. It is... Waitband.
> 
> > The internet became widely identifiable in Australia with the 
> > placing in 
> > 1986 of the .au appendage in the hands of Melbourne 
> > University academic 
> > Robert Elz.
> > 
> > The internet, a name derived from the 1960s term 
> > "internetworking", had 
> > been in operation as we know it since 1982 
> 
> Err... first Slip connection was Sept 1983. Before that it was UUCP. 
> First SGML was 1958
> First hypertext was 1962.
> 
> 
> Please define "How we know it...."
> Nothing on the net stays "how we know it" for more than a few thousand
> cpu cycles. The Net is the constantly morphing and evolving public ICT
> consciousness' of the world.
> 
> >and had existed in 
> > one form or 
> > another for more than 20 years before that.
> 
> Dial-up Internetworking had existed since 1948.
> TCP from about 1974.
> Dial-up Data access by public from French Videotext systems from 1972.
> 
> I presume you mean only TCP.
> 
> > 
> > But the decision of the University of Southern California's 
> > Information 
> > Sciences Institute to hand control of Australian domain names 
> > to Mr Elz 
> > brought organisation to its local evolution.
> > 
> 
> Organisation ? Or Australian Academic attention driven by ACS ??? 
> In which case the .oz suffix was rather more famous than the .au however
> regulatory interests won the day and .oz was dropped in favour of iso
> naming 2 letter conventions (3166). (But the vote was close... - I think
> someone didn't like that we could be confused with a part of Kansas).
> 
> I gotta say, until 1992, domain names were of almost zero interest on
> the net.
> 
> Most people just had a domain name so that UUCP worked properly.
> But because DNS was broken more often than it worked, people just used a
> computer name and IP numbers.
> 
> The original naming convention for those computers on a network were: 
> 
> cromenco_scl,tomslab,ubvax}!tom
> Which morphed to cromenco_scl%tomslab.UUCP at UB.ARPA and became
> tom at 129.214.???.???
> 
> ....it worked.
> 
> I wont even describe the other routing protocol networks:
> EARN/BITNET, Janet, Berknet, Decnet and of couse FIDO.
> 
> > As the internet in Australia grew from a project involving a 
> > handful of 
> > organisations like universities and the CSIRO, 
> 
> Harumph!!!
> If we say that there were 36 universities and 18 of them were connected
> via UUCP in 1982 and ANSTO and CSIRO were also connected then 
> there were more far internet accounts outside of universities than
> inside... About 200 Corporations who had their own connections (See
> AUUGN org newsletter below for a partial list).
> 
> To get an Internet account in those days you just had to be an alumni of
> a university outside of Australia. Because in Australia, academia
> protected access to their precious net from all comers and resisted
> "sharing" fiercely.
> 
> "Oh, you're not currently at a University... Post Grad? ... Oh you went
> to a foreign University ? Well I suggest you contact them... Sorry,
> can't help."
> 
> >the assignation of .au 
> > domain names passed from Mr Elz to such organisations as AusRegistry 
> > and .au Domain Administration (.auDA).
> > 
> > The .au domain is now a part of almost 2.1 million websites, has the 
> > highest pro-rata penetration rate in the world and is 
> > regarded as one of 
> > the internet's most secure and trusted namespaces, according to 
> > AusRegistry CEO Adrian Kinderis.
> > 
> > The internet integrity of Australia also benefits the country by 
> > attracting commerce, tourism and investment.
> > 
> 
> Hmm. Yes. The Internet was attracting Tourism and exchange students
> because of NNTP access in the eighties, not the .AU domain.
> In fact the strict requirements initially meted out by the .Au registry
> (and the ridiculously expensive fees) nearly sent all Australian
> business registrations overseas forcing corporations worldwide to
> consider that Australia's internet regime was too tough to do business
> with.
> 
> It is only the shortage of .com TLD address space that forced
> corporations back to Australian registration.
> 
> Australia is also seen as a non-partisan, politically stable country
> unfortunately with little commercial imperitive opportunity due to our
> low population density and distance from the world population centres.
> The addition of initiatives like Internet Filters, "B" party charging
> and monopolistic fibre cable policies have damaged the majority of our
> overseas commercial aspirations although now with global unrest arising
> from the GFC, we are seen as a safe data haven and may be in a position
> to win large chunks of cloud and historical archive business __IF__ we
> lay another (estimated) 30 Terrabytes of Timor Sea and Pacific Fibre
> urgently.
> 
> On the plus side, what has saved our international e-commerce reputation
> are the Aussie comsumers. i.e.: The strength of our economy which makes
> Australians the most likely to buy after clicking on an advert.
> This leading Australian trait has placed us in the middle of the
> advertising interests fishbowl for careful study...
> 
> > "Just as Australia has a proud identity that it projects to 
> > the world, 
> > the .au space does the same for our online presence," said 
> > auDA CEO Chris 
> > Disspain. "The .au domain name is Australia's home on the 
> > internet. It's 
> > a safe, reputable environment."
> > 
> 
> True.
> 
> 
> In Summary, I think the story should have read:
> Internet AU Domain utilisation thriving in spite of... Rather than
> because of.
> 
> It's always nice to rewrite history to suit the survivors, just not
> always morally acceptable.
> 
> 
> TomK
> 
> Helpful References:
> ===============================
> 
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2001-January/008999.html
> 
> ICT AND LOW ACHIEVERS: WHAT DOES PISA TELL US?
> Richard SWEET and Alina MEATES, OECD
> Karpati, A. (Ed.) (2004) Promoting Equity Through ICT in Education:
> Projects, Problems, Prospects,
> http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/29/29/33680762.pdf
> 
> NEW MODES OF REGULATORY GOVERNANCE FOR THE INTERNET? COUNTRY CODE TOP
> LEVEL DOMAINS IN EUROPE
> http://regulation.upf.edu/ecpr-07-papers/ssimpson.pdf
> 
> AUUG Institutional Members as at 30/03/95 
> ftp://tuhs.org.ua/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V16.3.pdf (Page 32)
> 
> 
> 
> 


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