Sick of the Internet? Consider Minitel

The 1980s French networked videotex service allows us to imagine what the internet would look like today if its architects had followed a different path.

On June 30, 2012, at a brutalist military museum in the northwest of France, a group of local politicians, administrators, engineers, and military officers gathered somberly over champagne and hors d’oeuvres to mourn. The night before, in a digital start-up incubator, hackers, entrepreneurs, artists, and journalists had done the same, albeit over craft beer and roundtable discussions, with the anarchic energy of a funeral that’s also kind of a party. These were two “wakes” for the Minitel, a precursor to today’s Internet that had connected millions of French users in an era when most Americans had never been online. Decades after its heyday, the French government was finally putting the online service to rest, and admirers congregated to memorialize it.

“The one run by the state was very gloomy, sad and state-like,” said Julien Mailland, who attended both parties and co-authored an excellent book with Kevin Driscoll called Minitel: Welcome To The Internet. “But the private parties run by hackers were very festive, very exciting.”

In a way, these two parties were emblematic of two sides of the Minitel’s legacy. Minitel was a failure of sorts, a technology that would ultimately be supplanted by the world wide web as the global network of choice. Minitel would become synonymous in Silicon Valley with state interventionism and stifling French bureaucracy. But it was also wildly successful as an early experiment in making an accessible state-sponsored network that was widely adopted — one that led to all kinds of experimentation, cultural change, and an entirely new kind of community. These wakes were funerals for a dying technology; they were also celebrations of a different kind of internet that could have been. Because digital media developed in tandem with the internet we have, it’s worth considering how Minitel could have offered media a different model, too: one that made space for journalism online, instead of squeezing it to death.

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The Minitel was a videotex online service, accessible via small terminals that hooked up to telephone lines. Minitels had a screen, a keyboard, and a modem, and displayed only black-and white text. They were born in part out of Cold War-era anxiety around technology and information systems, areas in which France was perceived to have lagged behind its allies. By the end of the 1960s, only 60 percent of French households had a working phone line, and the wait for phone installation was three years long. (In New York, the wait was three days.) Mailland and Driscoll argue in their book that when socialist François Mitterrand was elected president in 1981, this anxiety intersected with his strong belief in state intervention. Under his leadership, Mitterrand pledged that the French state would be the chief innovator, regulator, and steward of a groundbreaking technology. “You really needed a state that was willing to take a huge financial hit,” Mailland said in a video interview.

When the Minitel debuted in 1983 the international press received it as a novelty. “As treasurer of a small engineering company in this dour eastern French town, Hubert Swalduz used to call the bank every day to ask about his company’s accounts,” a New York Times article written from Metz, France, in 1984 opened. “Since the start of the year, however, all the information comes to him on a little television screen in his office by touching a key.” The article would go on to detail other wonders of the new technology: instead of a bulky phonebook, French users were now able to look up numbers via terminal! They could order merchandise from mail-to-order companies! They could get “the latest information about restaurants, movie houses and shops, just for the cost of a phone call.” The most miraculous part of it all was that the French government was giving away and installing the terminals for free, to anyone who wanted one.

Minitel operated on a pay-as-you-go model, which ultimately yielded significant returns for the government-run telecom company that managed the network. It also included subscriptions to particular services that cost extra. By the end of the 1980s, every French adult could reportedly access Minitel either at home, work, or at public terminals; nine million terminals would be in homes by the mid-1990s. By comparison, only 14 percent of Americans had internet access at home in 1995.

Mintel had official and highly practical uses. You could, for instance, check the price of grain or the weather, see if your stocks had gone up or down, get virtual mail, search for phone numbers, or test your IQ. Although newspapers were initially one of the loudest voices of opposition to the Minitel — Le Monde predicted in 1980 that the dissemination of information on Minitel would be “the grave of the written press” — newspapers and magazines soon launched videotex versions that were financially successful and widely read. This early digital media also often took the form as debates amongst readers and had a novel immediacy. “The Minitel is a cross between a newspaper and the radio. The information is immediate, but it stays in a readable form which you can go back and consult,” Isabelle Venuchot, a French journalist, told The Washington Post in 1986. A Libération editor marveled that the paper was able to publish the results of the Los Angeles Olympics right away, long after print deadlines in France had passed. 

The government struck a deal with regional and national newspapers because of their initial strong opposition, allowing them to own and operating subscription messaging services. These were originally intended as an extension of their existing platforms, but something else quickly emerged: nascent online communities. The most famous such communities, dubbed Minitel rose, were sex chat services that allowed subscribers to message in one of the earliest forms of (text-only) sexting. These became the most popular services on Minitel, even once crashing the entire system. They employed numerous people who often faked their gender or other aspects of their identity in chats — which seems commonplace now, but at the time, it was revolutionary.

It was nonetheless tightly regulated: all new messaging services had to be approved by the government, and all traffic passed through gateway servers, so, Maillaid and Driscoll note, sexually explicit chats — particularly those of sex workers soliciting new clients — “were monitored and shut down by France Telecom with great zeal.” At their peak, these Minitel rose sex chat services were being used for an estimated four million hours a month, and many of them were owned by France’s largely conservative regional press. One French entrepreneur said some newspapers only survived because of their stakes in the sex chats: “It was considered a cash machine.” 

Sex chats, internet theorist Howard Rheingold argued, might have been the beginnings of community on Minitel, just as X-rated video led to the early adoption of the VCR, but they were only the beginning. In 1986, mostly using Minitel — particularly the channel of the left-wing newspaper Libération — French university students coordinated a national strike. Unions and other movements would follow suit throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It was a precursor to the role social media would play in organizing and protest movements in the following millennium: information could travel instantaneously across long distances, organizers could reach allies in unexpected places, and an individual could reach a wide audience quickly.  

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Economist Eli Noam called the Minitel “a technologically backward system”; Media historian and Stanford professor Fred Turner said that it is “a joke” in Silicon Valley. Mailland and Driscoll observe that the Minitel would become a textbook example of how not to build a networked system: “centrally planned, controlled, and laden with bureaucracy.” It is true that Minitel flopped outside of France, which tried to export the system to the US and elsewhere in the 1990s with little success. In part, this had to do with how its specific French context allowed it to flourish; in France, there was a historical investment by citizens in the state, and also a state that was willing to make a major financial investment in technological infrastructure. 

In the following decades, the development of the world wide web overtook the Minitel financially and technologically. The internet became faster and cheaper for the consumer, and in the mid-1990s, Minitel usage in France started to decline while internet usage climbed. Even in its home country, Minitel became increasingly obsolete and maligned for its backwardness. It was, after all, still text-only. 

But with some hindsight, perhaps the system doesn’t look so bad — or the conditions of the contemporary internet don’t look so good, unless you happen to be profiting from them, which amounts to the same thing. Minitel can offer a vision of an alternative network, one that was unparalleled in accessibility, since its underlying infrastructure was free to anyone who wanted it. Minitel also relied on a different mode of regulation for speech on its platforms; a different balance between private and public investment; a different means of monetization that didn’t rely on data and protected user privacy; and a different way for the press to be included in the transition to the digital era. 

Not all of these alternative paths are utopic: State regulation of speech can be more problematic than regulation by private companies, and government censorship was the subject of debate in France during the era of Minitel. “But you can still sue if the government violates your fundamental rights,” Mailland said. “At least you are not at the mercy of Facebook or Twitter and their ‘community guidelines’ or however Zuckerberg is feeling on a given day.”

Minitel offered a promising model for data privacy, too. At the end of the month, no record of sites visited by users was stored; the sites themselves didn’t know who was calling into them. “There was a buffer in the middle of the phone company, which was run by the government,” Mailland said. It was impossible for companies to track user behavior because there was no data for them to buy and sell. 

To the press, Minitel offered some clear alternative revenue streams, even as it posed something of an existential threat. Because Minitel was government-supported, there was a concerted effort to answer the lobbying of media groups — and they were able to have a lucrative stake that helped offset the digitization of ads and information. In the end, this collaboration meant that “the grave of the written press” wasn’t the Minitel — it was the World Wide Web.

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In 2012, when the systems went dark for good, there were still about 400,000 regular Minitel users, including 2,500 dairy farmers whose entire industry ran almost solely on Minitel into the 2010s. Especially for the rural and aging populations, Minitel was better, cheaper, and more reliable than the modern internet. “Computers are all right, too, but it’s not the same,” cattle farmer Yves Denais told the New York Times in 2012. “I’m not very ‘Internet.’” A Facebook group called “Save Minitel” grew and then waned. The whole system went into a kind of permanent repose.

Most activity on the Minitel was ephemeral, an idea that platforms like Snapchat and Instagram are reviving today. There is no archive of Minitel rose, or stock prices, or the online phone book, or the news magazines that were housed there. Mailland and Driscoll founded and maintain the Minitel Research Center, whose physical collection is kept in Bloomington, Indiana at Indiana University. (The collection includes a leather Minitel carrying-case and lapel pins of Minitels that were popular in the ‘80s.) Christian Quest, a former Minitel entrepreneur, also has a large collection of rare Minitel-related items and started an active forum on a website called Musée du Minitel.

As with most old technologies, one of the hardest things to resurrect is the wonder and strangeness of its early use. 

“It’s like a drug,” one user told the Washington Post in 1986. “Some people spend up to four or five hours a day consulting their Minitels.”

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