OzEmail

» see ozemail.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in may 1996 i was a schoolkid in turkey, two years away from my first modem. that month ozemail became the first australian technology company to list on nasdaq, a fact that would have meant nothing to me at any point in the following decade. what makes this one worth a grave is not the dial tone. it is that for about four years an australian dial-up company was a stock people flew to new york to buy.

it began in 1992 as an email business. sean howard had eight staff and a product that made sense in a country where the alternative was a fax machine. in 1994 malcolm turnbull and trevor kennedy put money in and the thing was relaunched as an internet service provider under the ozemail name. turnbull was not a politician yet. he became prime minister of australia twenty years later, and a large part of the money that made him independent of his own party came out of this company.

the nasdaq float on 28 may 1996 raised more than fifty million australian dollars and made ozemail the reference point for every australian technology story for the rest of the decade. an asx listing followed in 1998 under the ticker ozm. worldcom took a minority position that december and owned the whole company by 24 february 1999, at a price usually quoted around 520 million us dollars. turnbull walked away with 57 million of it.

the part i can speak to is the shape rather than the detail. every country had one of these, a local isp that got large before anyone had agreed what large meant, and then got bought by something bigger and foreign. mine was ttnet, with superonline around the edges of the same years. no turkish dial-up provider ever became a stock story the way this one did, so when ours changed hands it changed hands quietly and nobody in new york wrote it up.

~ the dossier ~

~ the float ~

28 may 1996 is the date that carries the weight. ozemail listed on nasdaq under the ticker ozemy and raised over fifty million australian dollars from investors who mostly could not have named a single australian internet company before that morning. this was ten months after netscape went public. the trade had the same shape: a small company selling access to something nobody could value, priced as though the access itself were the asset.

for a few years the price behaved as if that were true. the asx listing in 1998 gave the company two markets and a permanent place in the australian business pages. worldcom bought in that december and completed the takeover on 24 february 1999. for a dial-up business with a few hundred thousand customers, 520 million us dollars was the number that told australia the boom had arrived locally.

~ what really happened ~

there is no shutdown date, and any grave that hands you one is guessing. worldcom went bankrupt in july 2002 in what was then the largest corporate failure in american history, and the australian subsidiary sat inside the wreckage for two and a half years while administrators found buyers for the parts. iinet, a perth company that had spent the decade as a tier-two provider, bought the ozemail business on 28 february 2005. the deal took iinet past 620,000 customers and made it the third largest isp in the country.

then the brand was allowed to expire. new customers were signed up as iinet from the start. existing ozemail accounts kept working and kept their usernames, so for years afterwards australians were typing an ozemail address into forms for a company that no longer sold anything under that name. by 2006 there was effectively nothing left of it except those addresses. the ending was administrative, and administrative endings do not get an announcement.

~ what got buried with it ~

what went with it was the idea that an isp could be a national brand rather than a utility bill. ozemail advertised on television. it had a founder people could name and a share price ordinary australians followed. none of that survived the move to broadband, where the product became a line item from a telco and the only variable left was speed against price.

the other thing buried there is malcolm turnbull's origin story, which australians know and almost nobody else does. the man who ran the country from 2015 to 2018 got a substantial part of his independence from a dial-up company that stopped existing before smartphones did. politicians usually come out of law or out of unions. this one came out of an isp, and the isp does not have a website anymore.

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