Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Mailland and Driscoll; MIT Press) describes the mass market early 1980s French system that shared many characteristics with the Apple and Google app store systems. A monopoly provider allowed third parties to build and offer applications to a captive audience, prevented via technical means from patronizing unapproved application vendors. The captive users were billed by the monopoly periodically.
As a computational platform, Minitel was composed of three components: terminals, servers, and the network infrastructure to interconnect them. Unlike the videotex/teletext systems being assembled elsewhere in Europe, Minitel was designed to encourage the development of privately owned third-party services. In this respect, Minitel was an early example of a technical platform intended to support an economic platform or “multisided market” by bringing together potential user-consumers with service providers while extracting a small rent for making the match.
The PAVI [switch into which the terminals dialed] also played a part in the enforcement of Télétel censorship. If a service was found in violation of Télétel rules, the PAVI would be programmed to refuse to connect incoming callers. The PAVI determined, call by call, which servers were accessible, to whom, and under what conditions.
While the standard X.25 protocol enables all hosts on the network to act as routers, or packet switches, the DGT implementation of X.25 did not.38 In this nonstandard variant of X.25, therefore, the DGT deliberately prevented the decentralized, privately owned servers at the edges of the network from acting as routers.39 Only the operator-controlled nodes were allowed to route packets. This meant that virtual circuits that would have been possible using a standard X.25 implementation were prohibited, thereby forcing all user traffic to pass through one of the State-run gateways
On the other hand, the servers that hosted content were all privately owned as well as decentralized to the edges of the network.33 This stood in contrast to the other European videotex experiments, particularly those in England, Germany, and Switzerland, where all content was hosted on centralized servers operated by the monopoly PTT operator. In those systems, potential content providers rented space on a shared central server.34 In France, however, it was left to the content providers to purchase and administer their own servers. These privately operated machines were then added to the edges of the network through a digital data line leased from the State-controlled public data network, Transpac.
users were not required to input any payment information at all. The DGT instead would bill users directly by adding a simple “Télétel use” fee onto their monthly phone bills. Since everyone who had a phone line would get a free Minitel, and since both the Minitel ecosystem and public switched telephone network (PSTN) were managed by the DGT, all one would have to do to use the terminal would be to plug in the electric socket, connect the phone line, et voilà, you were online.
The Kiosk billing system was, in many ways, the “killer app” underlying the runaway success of Minitel.50 The Kiosk also reflected the French political tradition of centralization found in so many other aspects of the system.51 Like the PAVI gateways in which it was implemented, Kiosk placed the DGT at the center of all online activity.
As early as 1980, the service providers’ association indicated that it did not want the DGT to be involved in the commercial side of Minitel: “Billing and collection shall be handled by the service providers only, the DGT must only intervene as an information carrier.”54 Billing, it reasoned, was a site of potential innovation and competition best managed by private enterprise.
Instead of Kiosk, early Minitel service providers requested that a chip card payment technology be implemented.55 Payments through credit cards could have been accommodated in an architecture where content servers were allowed to act as switches, since all the payment information would have been included in the packets being switched. A chip card system, in other words, would have enabled the decentralization of payment on Minitel.56 By rejecting the chip card proposal in favor of the Kiosk system, the DGT established itself as the single administrative gatekeeper of all commercial activity on the network.57
The Kiosk system positioned the State as organizer, controller, and taxer of all economic activity.
At least in the early days, signing up as an application provider did not move on “Internet time”:
Consider the story of three jobless yet enterprising individuals who in 1985 attempted to launch a Minitel site. Dubbed Amphitel, the proposed site consisted of an online guide for the city of Grenoble and featured online travel services for tourists. The site’s founders partnered with the Sopra corporation, a major information technology services provider, and secured funding from Credit Agricole, one of the largest French banks.
They first wrote to their congressperson, one Bernard Montergnole, to request assistance in navigating the Minitel regulatory framework. The congressperson, not up to speed with that aspect of the law but eager to support digital innovation in his district, wrote to the minister of communications, M. Georges Fillioud, on February 4, 1985, requesting an opinion as to what authorization must be secured by the enterprising trio in order to roll out their service onto the Minitel network. The communications minister, though, was not up to speed either and had to request an opinion from his legal department. On March 26, 1985, almost two months from the congressperson’s letter, the answer came from Jacques Vistel, a State Council justice delegated to the communications ministry, to explain to the minister that if the service is a mere e-mail system, then no authorization was required, but that if the service used electronics as a means of transmitting information to the public, then the entrepreneurs must retrieve official authorization forms from the local prefect and formally request an authorization to provide their service over the network. The prime minister’s legal service archives, where this exchange was recorded, do not indicate whether or not this politically correct service ever made it online.
The authors are not impressed with what Americans have built for themselves:
In 2010, Apple removed the WikiLeaks app from its App Store, making it more difficult for iPhone users to access content published by WikiLeaks. The decision by Apple to block access to WikiLeaks through its platform was not motivated by any legal mandate—WikiLeaks was protected by the First Amendment—but rather by public relations considerations.
Unlike Minitel, with its implied commitment to the French public interest, privately run platforms like CompuServe and the Apple Store are governed by an opaque, centralized form of authority—gated communities à l’Américaine.
If Apple does not want an app to be part of the iOS ecosystem, the developer of the app cannot sue Apple. In contrast, because Télétel was a public platform managed by the State, French service providers were afforded due process. Only illegal content could be rejected, not content that the platform operator did not like.
So while the platform was not fully open and chilling effects certainly existed, due process principles ensured that legal content could eventually make it through—a level of openness that has never existed on the prototypical walled gardens built in the United States.
In almost every way, the Apple ecosystem mirrors the design of Télétel—except that it lacks the transparency and openness of the French system.
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.
Minitel was running without encryption and therefore the government had the technical ability to censor communications, but apparently chose not to.
Individual users were not subject to State censorship, and as a result, Minitel became an important platform for fringe political and cultural activity.58 For instance, during the massive antigovernment student demonstrations of 1986, Minitel became “a peerless tool for information and communication” used to organize the protests.
More: Read Minitel: Welcome to the Internet