A bit of a weird thing to write. Telstra never “owned” the Australian internet, actually they tried very hard to undermine it, with MSN - which most people forget/don’t know actually started life as a dialup walled garden.
There was at least one hard working Aussie ISP that had their own international transit - Connect.com. Connect did ultimately drop their independent transit in favour of Telstra, but IIRC that was the end of them - lack of independent transit meant they were paying the same wholesale rate as everyone else. It was sad to see them fail.
Some friends and I founded one of Australia’s very early regional ISPs, in Ballarat, and I’m quite proud that I personally gave quite a few people their first experience on the dialup internet.
We ended up buying our own transit too, in fact we were the first Australian ISP to use satellite for backhaul, our transit was commissioned a few weeks before Optus.
Connectivity was charged per byte downloaded, but uploaded was free. So we set up asymmetric routing where downloads came over satellite direct from the USA, while uploads went via Telstra. This dramatically reduced the cost of internet, at the expense of a small amount of latency, which nobody really noticed considering that it was mostly dialup and that terrestrial links were very oversubscribed.
Telstra eventually got wise and started charging for total (up+down) but it was still cheaper to do it our way. I think it worked financially and practically (in terms of latency) until the first big cable was laid, Southern Cross. But by then I was out of the game.