Minitel (Part 2)

Minitel (Part 2)

In Part 1 of our Minitel series, we introduced listeners to the world's first successful attempt at bringing society into the networked-age. France accomplished this through massive public investments in improvements to its once-dated telecommuncations networks, the deployment of state-run network infrastructure and campaigns encourage adoption of end-user terminals – as well as for private entrepreneurs to take on the challenge of designing and implementing services for consumers.

The democritization of informatics which trook place during the 1980s would penetrate the workplace, schools and millions of homes, while the ARPANET remained walled-off to the general public. If ARPA believed networked computing would radically transform warefare, French researchers Simon Nora and Alain Minc who wrote the 1978 report for French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, which would kick-off the Minitel revolutioon, viewed technology as playing a tranformative role in society writ-large – capable of re-organizing traditional power structures, labor law, the press, firms, etc.

Nora-Minc Report

Cover Page of the Nora-Minc Report entitled "The informatisation of society"

The 1970s marked for France -- as for the rest of the world -- a dramatic end to the so-called "Thirty Glorious Years" which produced immense wealth and stability on the back of US exports. As neoliberal logics began to take hold following the collapse of Bretton-Woods, the global energy crisis and the Nixon shock, France found itself entering an era of austerity and a slow dismantling of its highly-developed welfare state.

The Nora-Minc report observed these shifts in global economic forces and argued that only by embracing the "informatics" age could France hope to stay competitive and maintain a healthy import-export ratio -- while admitting that unemployment would likely rise. While better written than most contemporary observations on the eventual impact of AI, the Nora-Minc report presents technological forces as inevitable as a those of nature -- rather than the result of choices undertaken by the State and society.

Whether than Nora-Minc report acurately predicted the era of informatics -- or was foundational in bringing it about -- is a question we leave to historians, but one thing is for certain: it served as the basis upon which the French President and the PTT Ministry would develop the Minitel system.

Centralization

As discussed in our episode France 101, France is a unitary State -- meaning only the national legislature is authorized to make laws. In this very image, France's institutions are largely centralized, both in terms of their organization, but also geographically in the nation's capital of Paris. This model stands in stark contrast with American Federalism, where the Federal Government would struggle to launch a nationwide program like Minitel without massive cordination inefficencies -- or even active obstruction from states.

This logic of centralization, dates back to the French revolution and obsession with rationality -- which lead to the (breif) rationalization of date and time in the form of the Republican calendar and attempt at implementing decimal time. Ironically, decimal-time would gain traction until the computing-age. Unsurprisingly, France did not abandon its tradition of entralization when taking on the Minitel project -- indeed it would be the centralized State bureacracy which would plan and implement the system from Paris.

If it wasn't odvious to planners at the time, to some critics of the Minitel system, centralization itself would be seen as one of the potential explinations for Minitel's failure to stay relevant in the 1990s faced with the "decentralized" internet. This is because TCP/IP which forms the basis of the modern internet, allows for network traffic to dynamically take any advailable path to reach its destination and for packets to be routed indepdentenly through the network -- while allowing for asynchronous delivery and tolerating packet loss.

In comparision to TCP/IP, Minitel's Transpac network built upon the X.25 protocol, wasn't so dynamic -- instead the network mirroed a the traditional phone routing system whereby a connection request would be first routed from a terminal to a regional-node (called a PAV) which would create a conneciton with the regional-node near where the desired service was hosted, which in turn would open a connection to the service-provider's server -- then this connection would be held open until the end-user terminates the session.

If the Transpac network is technoglically inferior to that of the modern internet, it is likely because Transpac predates the TCP/IP and the World Wide Web -- so if there is a critique to be levied it is that the PTT failed to embrace these technological leaps as they occured int he late 1980s -- as opposed to a fundemental flaw with the Minitel system.

Why then did the PTT Ministry not embrace the superior networking technology coming out of CERN? There are likely many explinations -- but one might be that France's PTT Ministry was on the cusp of being dismantled and sold for parts as a result of the very neoliberal logics which would put France on the path of embracing the networked age in the late 1970s.

Censorship in France

Since the Minitel system relied on regional PAVs to route traffic, the State could effiectively block traffic which was unauthorized or for which it chose to regulate. The more decentralized nature of the internet makes this task significantly more challenging, since even if regional-nodes run by modern ISPs were to block certain IP address ranges, so long as their exist a viable path for traffic to make it from A to B -- the traffic can be nevertheless be routed. This helps thousands of Tor users are able to conterveen internet restrictions.

This table shows the top-10 countries by estimated number of client connecting via Tor Bridges. Source: TorProject

However, just as "propoganda" has taken on a universally negative conetation, so too has "censorship" -- yet just as public service announcements aren't branded with the black mark of "propoganda", not all content regulation deserves to be condemened as "censorship". Indeed, preventing the proliferation of CSAM, terrorist recruitment videos or revenge porn all seem like valid targets for State censorship -- just as they would be if they were distributed in their physical world.

This fact hasn't stopped technolgoists of the libertarian persuation from decrying censorship at the minorrest examples of states trying to regulate online content -- like when France arrested Telegram and its CEO during an investigation into the platform's alleged failure to comply French laws against platforms allowing terrorist content to be shared and distributed on its platform as we discussed on our 5th episode.

This absolutist conception of free speech, while not entirely coherent with some judical interpretations of the 1st Ammendement of the United States Constitution, it is at least plausible the US constitutional order might protect speech in favor of terrorism, promoting holacaust denialism, propogation of falsehoods/fake news, or insulting someone's sexual orentation -- however, the same cannot be said for the laws of France (and many other countries) where such speech may susceptible to criminal sanction by fines and/or prision (the ladder for speech related to terrorism).

While it is difficult to compare the limits of speech in France and United States, in particular because each US state has its own laws on the subject, we can provide a few speculative examples which may highlight some of the differences:

Example: "Mr. X stole 1.3 million dollars from taxpayers during their time in office"

In France, Article 29 of the Law on the Freedom of the Press of 1881 holds that public allegations or statements which allege a precise fact, which attacks the honnor, consideration or body of the implicated person, constitute deffemation.

In this context, the above statement would appear to allege a precise fact (theft of public funds while in office), which attacks the honnor of the implicated person (to be known as a theif damages one's reputation). If the statement is likely defamitory on its face, French jurisprudence permits those accused of defamation to be found not guilty in various circumstances, notably when the statement is true and alleged in good faith.

Example: "Mrs. Y a worthless coward"

In France, the Law on the Freedom of the Press of 1881 distinguishes defamation and slander via the notion of a precise fact which is being alleged. In absence of a precise fact, as is the case of pure insult to someone's honnor or charecter, only slander may be retained by the courts -- which is punishable by a fiine of 12,000 euros (fines are greater in some cases, including slander involving one's race, religion, ethnicity, sex, oreintation, handicap or gender identity).

Example (taken directly from a French government website): wearing in public a t-shirt which reads "born the 11th of September, I am a bomb".

Screenshot 2025-01-18 at 15.33.55.png

In France, to directly provoke an act of terrorism or to appolgize, glorify or justify an act of terrorism is punishable by a fiine of 75,000 euros and up to five-years in prision according to 421-25 of the Criminal Code. Punishment is increased to up to 1,000,000 euros in fines and seven years in prison if the provocation or glorification occurs on an online public communication service.

Example: John tells his coworkers via Slakc that Alex is gay without his knowledge or permission.

Article 9 of the Civil Code holds that everyone has a right to a private life. Violations thereof give way to civil compensation to the vicitim of damages and the law empowers judges to take action to make the violation stop -- including forcing the removal of online posts. Revealing information like someone's romantic relationships, sexual oreientation or family matters may constitute a violation of one's private life.

In the above example, John has likely violated Alex's right to a private life by revleaing his sexual oreintation to others without his knowledge or permisssion. John would might be ordered to pay Alex compensation -- in addition to removing the Slack message by which he revealed this fact.

There is no doubt that some of the above examples may be objectionable restrictions of speech to some and indeed, as Americans ourselves, we find it a bit odd that the Government Website uses a t-shirt about September 11th as the main illustrative example of a crime which can result in up to five years in jail. Nevertheless, these restrictions cannot be seriouslessly decried as tyranical, since to do so would be to deny the democratic soveignty of France and its right to self-determination. Moreover, things aren't always so cut and dry, after all RSF's Freedom of the Press Index scores France well-ahead of the United States -- for whatever that is worth.

Censorship and Minitel

We established that the Minitel system, from a technical standpoint, may be more readibly censored than the internet owing to the way in which the state-controlled PAVs route traffic. However, in order for the accusation that Minitel was overly censonered to meet muster, it must be established that the State actually made use of this technical capability.

This may have happened in essentially three ways:

  • Prior authorizations for services with objectionable content being denied by the administration
  • Self-regulation owing to legal ambiguity
  • Enforcement of laws regulating speech

Prior Authorization

Initally, the PTT Ministry did not intened triage what services could be offered over Minitel -- however, pressure from the press lobby resulted in the errection of pre-authorization system whereby services needed to seek approval from their local prefects. This inevitably provided a degree of discretion to Prefects who could refuse to give authorization for services they found objectionable, however, there are mitigating factors to consider:

  • The prefects themselves were not likely to be closely reviewing individual applications -- instead this would be the task of functionnaireis who would only have the Prefect intervene to sign the final authorizations. Owiung to the number of applications, it is plausible that only true outliers would not be approved.
  • If the prefect were to reject an application, this refusal could be challenged in front of an administrative judge, who would be required to consider questions of equality, freedom of expression etc.
  • If a prefect were to reject a given applicaiton, services might have been able to submit their application again hoping it would go unoticied or submit their application in a different departement and thus to a different Prefect
  • Some service operators would misclassify or tone-down the substance of their applications in order to ensure they were approved -- knowing they would likely go under the radar for a long time

Moreover, this system was abanndoned several years in, likely due to ever-increasing mass of application -- instead services were reviewed after going online by a commission put in place at the national level.

Self-Regulation

In the 1980s, if it was not certain that Minitel services could be held accountable for user generated content, most understood that in all likehood they could be -- just as the French Press has historically been and remains to this day. This reasoing is not uniquely French, in fact, the New York Supreme Court took the same stance in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. until Federal Lawmakers passed Section 230 of the Communcations Decency Act shielding services from liability eminating from the content of their users. This intervention by congress, it may be argued, allows for inscrupilious service providers to passively permit their platforms to be used for illicit activity.

A notable example of this was the case of Backpage. In 2010, when Craigslist removed its adult classified ads section from its website—likely due to the overwhelming burden of ensuring that classifieds were not being used for illicit services (e.g., prostitution, child sex trafficking, etc.)—Backpage, the less successful competitor to Craigslist, capitalized on Craigslist's decision to exit the problematic market. The service began charging for adult ads, which quickly became its primary source of revenue. Law enforcement alleged that Backpage knew many of the website's classifieds were for illicit services, including the prostitution of minors, and that the service may have knowingly participated by "sanitizing" otherwise illicit ads. Nevertheless, in accordance with Section 230, prosecutors were barred from holding Backpage accountable for these allegations, as platforms cannot be held liable for the content posted by their users.

While the regime of self-regulation that emerged under Minitel may be critiqued for sometimes chilling speech or empowering service providers to censor their users, it is worth considering that shielding platform liability can enable services to profit from the illicit activity of their users. Moreover, self-regulation driven by fear of violating the law is at least grounded in the rule of law, as opposed to the arbitrary censorship regimes imposed by platforms like Facebook, which do not hesitate to remove otherwise perfectly licit content.


The story of Minitel is by no means black-and-white and allows us to undersand the internet from a different perspective. If you are interested in learning more, we encourage you to check out the book Welcome to the Internet by Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscol -- which we used in preparing this series.