[LINK] Happy birthday .au

[Tom Koltai]

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)