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Minitel : welcome to the Internet
Mailland J., Driscoll K., The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017. 240 pp. Type: Book (978-0-262036-22-1)
Date Reviewed: Jan 18 2018

What country is the most wired? It is perhaps surprising to discover that, at least in the 1980s, it was France. The French welcomed the Internet by wiring Minitel. Minitel anticipated transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP), online banking, e-commerce, virtual assistants, and home automation; experienced the first hack; and was the vehicle of online chat. Minitel “prefigured the innovation opportunities and economics, law and policy issues the world now has to grasp” (p. 127). Yet, Minitel fell behind and ultimately was not as innovative once public, commercial US enterprises emerged in the 1990s.

According to the authors, Minitel was a platform to distribute creations widely, cheaply, and with few constraints long before the commercial World Wide Web and dotcoms. One important question looms for the writers: is Minitel failed socialism? Previous studies have held that Minitel is a failure as opposed to free market US capitalism.

The structure of Minitel should be considered innovative since, although it was seen as singular, there were many different terminals, services, and peripherals. Use of the system peaked in 1993 after earlier dramatic growth from 1983 to 1987. Growth averaged nearly 40 percent per year during that stretch. There were late adopters and Minitel experienced a slow decline after 1991.

The writers argue that Minitel should be viewed as a platform, noting of course that the term did not emerge until the late 1990s. Later developments should be more familiar to us. The “platformization” by Facebook was typical of the transformation of countless dotcom firms such as PayPal or newcomers such as YouTube that described themselves as platforms. The authors argue that Minitel and its numerous subsystems qualify it as an early platform.

With soldering and programming, the freely distributed Minitel could be connected to a PC, which is typical of later platforms, thus providing enormous opportunities for microcomputer enthusiasts. A couple of providers supplied connections for limited applications. Some features and functions are groundbreaking, such as smart cards, which were available in the 1980s as were prepaid phone cards.

At the time, telematics, telecommunications, and computers were promoted by the French state as their preferred anti-American policies, in particular against the intrusion of IBM. Key to the thesis of their work, the authors insist that the French government and related social institutions were vibrant and encouraged innovation. However, it could be argued that the more moribund ITU (a union) workers lost out in the development sphere to the more dynamic TCP/IP protocol. Also, DGT, the French telecom, centrally ran servers, which may have been an additional retarding factor.

The promotion or retarding of innovation by the state is critical to the argument of the authors. They maintain that Minitel is not a victim of dirigisme or the Colbertist French government. They take US scholars to task by claiming that Minitel was a gated community or a walled garden. They claim that Minitel was decentralized and US scholars ignore or deny innovation at the edges of the network, which was spontaneous. Still, these innovations are not a result of the state, but in spite of it. Moreover, as they point out, the two commercial and public data networks that eventually superseded Minitel were based in the US.

In any case, in both countries, France and the US, examples exist including Minitel, Apple, and CompuServe, each of which exhibits aspects of a walled garden in four dimensions: the motivation for censorship, implementation of censorship, recourse available to censored service providers, and censorship of individual users. One of the strongest points of the work, and one that has not been resolved, is that just like Facebook stickiness increased usage and introduced inefficiencies in data delivery to retain users. Architectural features of both Facebook and Minitel served, or persist, as a form of censorship. Apple absolutely controls all communication on its platform. Operation is not in the interest of the public. The Internet may even be moving to less openness given the ubiquity of Apple.

The authors are correct in stating that state intervention does not necessarily result in a loss of freedom, but in the US the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) as privatized resulted in remarkable commercial success after 1995. Market forces could correctly be argued as being a key factor in unleashing innovation and superseding competing networks such as Minitel. Innovation is characteristic of individuals who could best take advantage of opportunities presented by either the Minitel platform or the post-1995 Internet. As a result, the more moribund Minitel platform, due to union labor and state servers, gave way to the competitive advantage of the open structure Internet. Those interested in this topic can also read these related works [1,2].

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  G. Mick Smith Review #: CR145790 (1803-0138)
1) Marchand, M. The Minitel saga: a French success story. Larousse, Paris, 1988.
2) Kahn, R.; Kellner, D. Technopolitics, blogs, and emergent media ecologies. In: Small tech: the culture of digital tools. 22-37, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2008.
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