Vicnet

» see vicnet.net.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

My internet in 1998 came from a telephone company and was billed by the minute. In Victoria, Australia the same two things, a connection and somewhere to put a website, came from a public library instead, at no charge, and it worked that way for twenty years.

The State Library of Victoria and RMIT set up a joint project in 1993 to build a web publishing service and an internet access provider for community organizations. Vicnet, short for Victoria's Network, opened the following year as a business unit of the library. It gave away website space, it ran training, and it kept an extensive web directory back when a directory was how anyone found anything. In time it became the largest host of community organization websites in the country.

The reach went well past hosting. Vicnet connected every library in Victoria to the internet for public access. With money from Multimedia Victoria it put connections into regional towns including Mallacoota and Apollo Bay. It helped form the Victorian Internet Exchange, a peering arrangement between Australian networks. Its Skills.net program, a 1999 finalist in the Global Bangemann Challenge, is credited with training more than 100,000 Victorians, and by 2009 its digital inclusion work covered 62 community language groups, which won an Australian and New Zealand internet award for diversity that year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a library was doing with a modem bank ~

A library is an institution for giving people access to things they cannot individually afford, and in 1994 that description fit a web server exactly as well as it fit a book. Vicnet also ran my connected community, usually written mc2, a platform where a group could keep a site without anyone on the committee knowing HTML. None of this was a business. It was a public collection that happened to be made of disk space, paid for out of the same civic logic as the reading room.

~ the switch-off ~

In December 2013 the library told its users the service was ending. As many as five thousand charities and community groups were on it. A spokeswoman for the Victorian arts minister explained that cheap or free hosting had become easy to get elsewhere and that most of the accounts were dormant anyway, which was a defensible thing to say and not quite a reason.

The library's own notice was more precise about the mechanics. Decommissioning of the servers started on 6 January 2014, and everything stopped on 31 January: community hosting, the fee-for-service hosting, domain and DNS management, email. Find another provider, it said. Any group that had been on the same address since the 1990s had a few weeks to work out what a nameserver was and who it should be paying.

~ the second ending ~

A residue survived the 2014 cut. Free hosting carried on for a tail of libraries and historical societies, quietly, for another eleven years, which is its own kind of institutional stubbornness. On 25 July 2025 a notice went up setting the real deadline at 19 December 2025, and that one took the rest.

The vicnet.net.au domain is still answering, though not from here, since it only serves Australian addresses now. Twenty years of community websites are gone regardless. The library built the thing when nobody else would and stopped when everybody else would, and the groups it was built for were exactly the ones for whom everybody else never quite counted.

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