The core of this book provided an in-depth political, social, legal, and business history of the Minitel platform’s technological design, implementation, and associated practices. The exceptional Minitel story enables us to grasp subtle shades on the openness spectrum. It also sheds new light on the entangled roles of the state and the private sector in fostering digital innovation in ways that defy conventional Internet policy wisdom. Chapter 2 mapped out the key technical components of Minitel, including its physical infrastructure, routing protocols, addressing scheme, video standard, software interface, and unusual accounting and billing apparatuses. Together, these elements sustained a generative platform for the creation of novel online services and the emergence of thriving virtual communities. Chapter 3 explained how the unique French culture was embedded in the protocols, and how state policy and national identity were woven deeply into the design and implementation of the system. In particular, we discussed the relationship between specific features of the Minitel platform and the French political tradition of centralization. The PTT at the center of all networked activity played as a leitmotiv against a backdrop of economic and infrastructure development. Most Minitel stories, especially on the US side of the Atlantic, stop there. In chapter 4, we showed another side: the hybrid architecture of the Minitel platform, with private innovation decentralized to the edges of the public network. This marked an ideological shift in French policy—one that enhanced spontaneity, mobility, and imagination, to borrow the words of Nora and Minc, and marked a transition from traditional dirigisme to state venture capitalism à la française. In chapter 5, we detailed the results of this public–private partnership on content creation, with a particular focus on Minitel rose and private-sector digital innovations that the United States would not see appear until after 1995. In chapter 6, we returned to a consideration of the radical potential of the Minitel system in the hands of a creative populace, and showed that the seemingly tight grip of the State over Minitel did not prevent fringe uses of the network.
But if the system was such a success, why did it fail? Taking the concepts of success and failure with a grain of salt, we now discuss what worked and what didn’t work in the Minitel story. We also address what we believe is a much more important question: What do we learn from the Minitel experience that can inform the design and regulation of future information networks to foster innovation and civic participation?
There are many reasons to think of Minitel as a domestic success. Télétel, as a cash cow for the DGT, enabled the State to completely digitize an ailing phone network. Within a few years, France went from having one of the worst phone networks in the industrialized world to leapfrogging into the most “wired” country in the world.1 By the same token, it enabled an entire country to go online to experiment, play, and work with tens of thousands of innovative services—something unheard of at the time elsewhere in Europe and the United States, where regional bulletin board systems and nationwide online services such as CompuServe were accessible to just a privileged fraction of the population and did not offer the same wealth of information and interaction. So why did Minitel succeed in terms of user adoption and diversity of content and services, while in the United States, privately run walled gardens floundered, only to be swallowed up by a state-funded Internet in the mid-1990s?
Today, Internet service providers in the United States argue that only deregulated, privately owned telecommunication networks can promote as well as protect openness and innovation. In their opposition to “net neutrality” regulations, they suggest that any form of government oversight will doom the Internet. Minitel provides a convenient bugbear for this extreme position. Look, they say, Minitel collapsed because it was regulated! In reality, however, the case of Minitel can be used to argue precisely the opposite point. Public investment and regulation of the Minitel platform did not equal total dirigisme nor did it stifle innovation. Public funding almost wholly supported internetworking research in the United States until the mid-1990s, when the backbone of the NSFNET was turned over to private control and commercial exploitation. In France, public support took a different form: in addition to building the underlying public data network Transpac, the State built a platform layer atop this infrastructure, and strategically incentivized participation on the part of both individual users and service providers.
In economic terms, the Minitel platform consisted of two sides: users and service providers. The State primed the pump on the user side of the market by distributing terminal equipment to the populace at no cost. It also stimulated growth on the service providers’ side of the market by supplying Kiosk, a convenient system for billing and accounting. Kiosk, it is worth noting, was not imposed but instead offered on a voluntary basis to the service providers, which as it turned out, embraced it en masse. This multifaceted state intervention catalyzed a private industry of Minitel service providers that had the freedom to innovate from the edges of the network. It also supported the development of a thriving hardware peripherals industry.
So, state intervention in an online system does not necessarily equal a loss of freedom. Quite to the contrary, if well thought out, public subsidy programs can foster creativity and development across the network. In contrast, leaving the private sector solely responsible for organizing a platform can lead to market fragmentation and stagnation, as evidenced by the US videotex experiments of the 1980s.2
Some critics of Minitel, including in France, suggest that “success” was only acquired at the cost of a major financial loss for the State. In 1989, the general auditor criticized the DGT and claimed that Télétel was losing money. The minister of the PTT countered, citing a number of independent reports showing massive surplus. Serious authors agree that it is impossible to tell whether or not Télétel made or lost money.3 Aside from Télétel’s own balance sheet, there are too many intangibles that are either difficult or impossible to quantify. Beyond counting the number of jobs created by the telematics industry, how might one quantify the cultural and economic value of leapfrogging into the digital age? Or creating a generation that was tech savvy before most people in the US had ever heard of the information superhighway?
Minitel touched multiple generations, from youngsters who took their first digital steps on the platform and went on to work in the dot-com industry, to older users who were left in distress on the 2012 shutdown. A significant number of elderly people, who appreciated the simplicity of the terminal and did not own PCs, were simply cut off from services they were in the habit of accessing, including the white and yellow pages.4 At the time of the closure, 3615 ULLA, one of the best-known messageries, was still getting twenty-five thousand calls per month—in spite of the wide availability of pornography on the Internet.5 In Brittany, a major agricultural region, 10 percent of the industry was still using Minitel professionally.6 Overall, France Telecom estimated that almost half a million users were still active on the platform—a testament to Minitel’s ease of use and robustness.7
What clearly did not succeed were efforts to export the Minitel model to other national contexts. Spreading the jewels of French technology throughout the world was an explicit goal of Nora and Minc’s influential report, The Computerization of Society, and France Telecom created a subsidiary, Intelmatique, to do just that. Although France Telecom spared no expense promoting its novel videotex system abroad, foreign countries simply did not embrace Minitel.8 Efforts to remake Minitel as a walled garden commercial service, such as 101 Online in the San Francisco Bay Area, were never crowned with success and are scarcely remembered today.9
Notably, however, certain architectural features of Minitel live on in the form of privately held platforms such as the Apple ecosystem. In almost every way, the Apple ecosystem mirrors the design of Télétel—except that it lacks the transparency and openness of the French system. Like the Télétel Kiosk system, the Apple App Store offers a market mechanism for matching third-party content providers with Apple users. Just as France Telecom took a fee from each Télétel connection, Apple takes a fee from each sale in the App Store. This closed system of micropayments makes it easy for app creators to monetize their products and is certainly a major factor in the success of the Apple platform. Like Télétel, Apple also exercises a form of censorship on its platform. As Wikileaks learned the hard way, one can only distribute software to iOS users with Apple’s permission.10
Unlike Télétel, Apple is not operating in the interest of the public. Whereas all censorship decisions on Télétel were subject to due process and could be appealed in a court of law, Apple exercises absolute control over the communication that takes place on its platform. The public has no interest, no representation, and no recourse to settle disputes. Likewise, where Télétel published an open standard and allowed any hardware to join the network, the Apple ecosystem is accessible only to Apple’s own devices. As a result, Minitel fostered the development of a strong, competitive, private hardware industry at the terminal level as well as the host level, which supported the development of French companies like Alcatel and Matra, and ironically, US companies such as AT&T and Texas Instruments, whereas every increase in Apple’s platform penetration mechanically increases Apple—and only Apple’s—hardware penetration. The difference in the exercise of control over engineering decisions extends also to the software and services provided on each platform. Whereas Minitel developers were free to use any technologies to create their services, iOS developers are limited to the programming languages and development tools approved by Apple.11
The comparison between Minitel and Apple offers two key lessons. First, openness is not a binary concept. Systems are neither fully open nor fully closed. Rather, openness is a shaded, multicomponent concept. This is important to keep in mind as we analyze the evolution of the Internet, which, it seems, is moving piece by piece toward less openness.
A second lesson of the Télétel/iOS comparison is that sometimes, complete control of network infrastructure by the private sector stifles rather than supports creativity and innovation. Apple controls its App Store content more strictly than France Telecom ever did because, as a privately owned platform, it is not bound by due process or free speech regulations. The prevalence of platforms such as the App Store suggests that targeted government intervention might restore competition and openness in arenas of the Internet where the interests of the private sector and those of the public have fallen too far out of alignment.
Many consider the end of Minitel after thirty years of continuous operation as proof of the success of the Internet over Minitel, and implicitly, the US model over the French one.12 We disagree. We consider, as Daniel Hannaby has also suggested, that the end of Minitel was simply the end of a cycle in the ongoing process of media change. “I don’t think it failed,” remarked the French entrepreneur. “Thirty years is a long time in technology. It’s a very long time.”13 Indeed, key parts of the platform had become antiquated. For example, the platform relied in great part on its low barriers to entry, particularly the low-cost, user-friendly terminal. What made the platform great, in that sense, is also what killed it. The basic videotex terminal was frozen in time and could not evolve without fundamentally changing the economics of the platform.
Télétel was also accessible from PCs, but by the time French PC adoption began to approach the penetration of Minitel, a wonderful new invention had appeared: the World Wide Web. And here, naysayers see the triumph of private sector investment over publicly subsidized development. But this perspective overlooks two crucial historical details. First, the fundamental technologies giving rise to the web were developed in research institutions across the United States and Europe with public support. As Marc Andreessen described the development of his Mosaic web browser: “If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn’t have happened.”14 Second, to argue that the de facto standardization of TCP/IP over X.25 or any other internetworking protocol reflects the success of a specific policy position ignores numerous structural and contextual factors shaping the diffusion of protocols among academic and industrial computing facilities during the 1980s. The emergence of the web was not a triumph of US over French policy, otherwise unrestrained competition in the videotex field in the 1980s would have seen US online penetration rates trump the French ones. Rather, we may regard the emergence of the web as the end of a cycle: the replacement of a great technology, videotex, and a great platform, Télétel, with a more modern and even greater technology and ecosystem.
The end of Minitel prompts us to consider the telematics future spread out before us. It is a mistake to think that the Internet as we know it will survive as long has Minitel did. Thirty years is, indeed, a long time. The Internet has only been accessible to the general public for twenty years, and most people have only been online for half that time.15 There is no reason to think that in ten years, the Internet will be the same as today, and that the openness characteristic of the early Internet will persist.
As early as the 1990s, Lawrence Lessig pointed out that the Internet had the potential to become the antithesis of freedom.16 He was right. Soon after the privatization of the NSFNET backbone, governments around the world and corporations alike started moving toward partitioning the open Internet to sustain their own interests, which are not always in line with those of the citizenry. Consider, for example, the Great Firewall of China, or the cyberwalls implemented by corporations such as Netflix and Major League Baseball to partition the Internet by geography.17
The fundamental principles underlying the Internet, including openness and interconnection, have been contested ever since the Internet was privatized, for a simple reason: the corporations that control the center of the network have incentives that do not align with those of their users. The efforts of Internet service providers around the world to impose two-sided pricing models and violate net neutrality principles is aimed at shifting control from the edges toward the center of the networks. In real ways, then, Internet service providers are actively moving the Internet toward an architecture that more closely resembles Minitel than the decentralized networks of the 1980s and 1990s. When US Internet service providers try to charge content providers such as Netflix for privileged access to their networks, are they not acting like a centralized censor leveraging their monopolistic or oligopolistic position? Are they not trying to make the Internet look a little more like a privately run child of Télétel?
Minitel was not just the result of state dirigisme, nor was the Internet solely the result of private sector ingenuity. Titling this book Minitel: Welcome to the Internet is not only a reminder that Minitel preceded the public Internet but also an argument for thinking differently about shaping the Internet’s future. As a platform, Minitel was in many ways similar to platforms operated by Amazon, Apple, Google, or Facebook. But whereas today’s dominant platforms are operated wholly in the interest of their owners, Minitel represented a complex balance of public and private interests. As platforms continue to enclose the online world, the Internet risks being reduced to a set of incompatible walled gardens. The story of Minitel, with its three decades of continuous operation, offers guidance toward a different future characterized by a commitment to serving the public interest. Unless strategic government intervention preserves the elements of openness and the balance of power between public and private interests that drew so many hackers, entrepreneurs, experimenters, and explorers to the Internet in the first place, the Internet as we have known it since the 1990s may not live to see thirty years.