It was out of necessity because transit was fucking expensive back in the '90s. You had a national monopoly basically with a single cable to the US. Any other transit was satellite and had piss poor latency. Our ISPs had metered traffic (traffic that went out to that external monopoly) and unmetered traffic (stuff that stayed local inside peering points) so of course a lot of our local services grew up around the far cheaper peering points like PIPE, WAIX, SAIX and so on.