Melbourne IT Domain Registrar and Hosting Company

Melbourne IT is an Australian internet company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Formed in 1996, its primary business is domain name registration in most of the major national and global top-level domains. It also offers web and email hosting services.

The company is a successful medium-sized (in the Australian context) internet business, with 2004 earnings of approximately 4.5 million AUD (EBIT) on revenues of about 60 million AUD, and continues to grow steadily. It has operations in several European countries through the acquisition of Cogent, as well as a San Francisco office.

Melbourne IT is perhaps best-known to the wider community for the unusual story of its origins. In 1989, the University of Melbourne, an institution with a very long history of computing research dating back to CSIRAC in the mid-1950s, was the first Australian organization to be connected to the Internet. The Computer Science department's senior system administrator (and notable BSD Unix developer) Robert Elz was placed in charge of the .au top-level domain, an arrangement that worked quite satisfactorily through the early 1990s when the internet was of interest only to a few educational and research institutions.

When interest in the Internet exploded outside academia in about 1994, Elz found himself swamped with businesses seeking registration. Domain name registration was not his primary work responsibility, and Elz was famously uninterested in business. Delays in registration times grew to months. This caused considerable consternation in the business community, and the federal government eventually became involved. Melbourne University also began to be aware of the possible commercial value of the rights to assign domain names, particularly in the .com.au second-level domain. After protracted negotiations, a startup company, Melbourne IT, was formed, and was listed right in the middle of the Internet stock market bubble. It made a spectacular debut on the stock market, with a number of well-connected investors allocated shares in the Initial Public Offering making massive stag profits. Interest in the shares was particularly strong because of the paucity of high-tech companies on a market dominated by banks and mining companies; web editor software company Sausage Software was another company caught up in the bubble. There were even investigations into whether the stock was deliberately undervalued by the underwriters when listed.

Melbourne University itself was quite content with its huge windfall of $130 million and, as predicted publicly by at least one member of the computer science department in the immediate aftermath of the float, the stock declined, and completely crashed in 2001 to reflect the actual revenues and profits and a more realistic outlook for the company.

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