Connect.com.au was one of the first commercial Internet service providers (ISP) to operate in Australia. The company was founded in 1991 by Hugh Irvine, Benjamin Golding and Joanne Davis, in conjunction with a small group of highly technical staff including Chris Chaundy. From the outset Connect aimed for supplying high end Internet services to the corporate and wholesale market, marking a stark contrast to the many small ISPs which grew out of the PSTN Bulletin Board systems or the APANA nodes. In addition to the comprehensive commercial services, Connect also supplied some additional services to both the Australian and International communities. Free DNS services were provided to various smaller nation-states on the sub-continent and throughout the Pacific Rim, in many cases being the primary authoritative server for these countries until they could provide their own infrastructure. Some of these countries include, but are not limited to, Fiji, Kiribati, Nepal and Micronesia. In May, 1994, Connect.com.au became the first ISP with a formal arrangement to use the university AARNet network as its internet backbone. Within Australia Connect became the registry for the .net.au namespace to reduce some of the burden of these domain registrations from Robert Elz. This coincided roughly with the establishment of the .com.au registry, Melbourne IT. Connect provided .net.au domains free of charge until a policy change allowed the introduction of registration fees in 1997. Domains registered prior to this change remained free until the .au namespace was deregulated in 2002. During 1997 and 1998 connect.com.au's new management lobbied the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) for equal standing with Telstra in relation to the inequities in the exchange of traffic between itself and Telstra, known as peering. Optus and OzEmail joined the connect.com.au ACCC initiated action. After two years of costly investigations and brinkmanship in 1998 the ACCC issued a competition notice Against Telstra, (the first ever issued against Telstra) requiring them to remedy the traffic imbalance and work with Connect.com.au, Optus and Ozemail to develop a traffic interconnection arrangement. The parties settled the dispute privately prior to the ACCC taking further action against Telstra. Connect.com.au faced ongoing criticism from the ISP industry about the traffic peering arrangement with The "Big Four" ISPs at the time, Telstra, Optus, OzEmail and connect.com.au. The ISP community felt that connect.com.au had let them down by not passing on the full peering traffic benefit. A group of ISP's sought to take