Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing &quot;service providers&quot; to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the &quot;porn&quot; (mostly text or chat based, some very creative &quot;graphical&quot; stuff), ...). Then those scams become so pervasive that trust in the system is completely lost, which makes it useless. Three, rapid mass abandonment when even a lower quality &quot;free&quot; alternative becomes available (internet over slow modems, hell, even BBSes posed a serious challenge to minitel).<p>The thing people always forget to mention is that minitel was metered. Every second you spent on minitel was charged, with some part of that charge shared with the content provider. There were also content providers (ie. &quot;webshops&quot;) that paid for the customers to be able to be on their site for free.<p>The reaction to increased scams ? Why France Telecom stared charging more, of course, making the scams worse ... and worse ... and worse. Then suddenly all was abandoned in 2003 or so, with only paid-for sites remaining (essentially web banking, and some stock broker type stuff that&#x27;s similar but more complex than web banking).<p>Of course, the whole exercise was repeated with &quot;value added services&quot; on Cell phones in the late 90s and early 2000s (also charged by the &quot;time spent online&quot;, and also filled to the brim with scams), and now again with android and iphone.