[10697] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Internet vs Minitel : a futuristic view of the network evolution ?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Sun Mar 6 01:40:48 1994
Date: Sat, 5 Mar 1994 18:35:50 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: LEHOUX@vax.lse.ac.uk
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: LEHOUX@vax.lse.ac.uk's message of Fri, 4 MAR 94 08:39:17 GMT <9403040839.AA07640@psi.com>
I am a great admirer of Minitel, and although I disagree with various
very specific points and certainly some conclusions made by Theirry
Lehoux his overall thesis can not be cast aside or ignored merely
because one can find a small factual error here and there or that a
sub-conclusion he draws is arguable.
Minitel has a fundamental superiority to the current Internet: It is
ubiquitous, it is a part of many if not most people's lives in much of
France.
Minitel is slow (most terminals are 1200b tho high-speed cards exist
for PC's), it is clunky by our adrenaline-pumped wirehead standards,
it seems to be nearly hopelessly locked into something very close to a
dumb ascii terminal interface.
Yet, you go into a small hotel in Paris and want to look up a phone
number, make a reservation at a restaurant, etc and you will end up on
a Minitel (or someone will for you, most of us thus technologically
illiterate Americans et al haven't a clue how to operate a minitel
terminal.)
You look at a billboard and Minitel id's to get more info or order are
almost always listed. You turn the TV on and Minitel access info is
super-imposed on the commercials much like 800 phone numbers in the
USA and elsewhere. Many, many stores, restaurants, shops, hotels,
corporations etc are hooked up to Minitel in a way for which there is
no comparison in the USA. In France Minitel is nearly as ubiquitous as
telephones.
Why is this?
I think on this aspect of ubiquity Theirry Lehoux is generally right
on the mark in his analysis:
1. Minitel (French Telecom, the French Govt) started addressing the
issues of making this technology ubiquitous very early in Minitel's
development, right from the start really. Rather than expending large
amounts of energy defining who should be excluded from this technology
they instead only considered inclusion and how to achieve it.
2. The self-hatred, self-defeating, overgrown adolescent whining of no
commercial use on the internet has long ago been played out.
It probably served a purpose in the past (though in retrospect I am
not always sure) but at this point it is nothing more than a temper
tantrum serving no purpose but to make a few vocal people feel like
they have some control over something they have no business or right
to control.
The sheer lack of definition of these rules and the
anti-private-sector hatred that is expressed whenever this comes up
belies their puerile and maudlin source.
A vaguely expressed and wholly hypothetical fear of seeing too many
advertisements seems to have provided license to exclude the majority
of this (and any civilized) country's activities, as if imposing some
sort of sentence without trial or reason and a verdict which, if
imposed similarly on the non-commercial champions, would send them
into paroxysms of rage. It is enfant terrible at its worst.
In essence, at this point in time, the argument that has been fallen
for by many who can influence the issues are:
A) Since abuse of commercial activity is at least in theory
possible we must therefore assume the worst of our fellow
citizens and forbid and censor it a priori and with the utmost
of vigor. I'll claim that the part of the brain which produces
this sort of thinking is the same part of the brain which
produces racial and tribal hatred, us vs them at its most
atavistic.
B) Due to (A) we now do not have to deal with the actual
technological and social challenges that may arise or are
needed to possibly make this into a positive aspect. We
have, as an analogy, solved our distaste for dirty diapers
by merely refusing to breed and avoided the labor of the
harvest by refusing to sow, voila', aren't we clever...
C) The argument used repeatedly is that somehow because
the Internet was in part funded by tax monies that therefore
those who provided those tax monies should not be permitted
near it. It should be limited only to those who are consumers
of tax monies. The logic of this and the sheer self-hatred
of fellow citizens implicit in it escapes me entirely. As
if in any other aspect of life anyone making this argument
can survive by excluding the private sector!
3. Integration of the internet into social structures of this society
has been neglected in some bizarre need to deny that those social
structures exist.
What's bizarre is the mind-numbing obsession with technological
"solutions" (always just over the horizon) to what are basically
social and organizational problems.
Propose that we should encourage wine-purveyors to list their prices
and take orders over the net and half those present will argue that
this is too commercial and the other half will argue that it requires
a massive investment in the development of new wine-price-listing
operating systems paradigms and network protocols and GUIs so is
undoable (at least in the foreseeable future) for that reason and not
to be considered further.
It is a wonderfully closed system: That which is possible is
forbidden, and that which is not forbidden is deemed not possible.
Do I believe that Minitel will take over the perceived role of the
Internet? No, I do not, not internationally. It is at this point old
and basically unchampioned outside of France. It was a wonderfully
successful experiment whose results should be learned from.
However, I do suspect that something may well overtake internet over
the next few years. Perhaps arising out of the phone companies or
cable TV companies or some alliance. The investment of the internet,
rebuilding it from scratch in another form, is well within the grasp
of such a project. It may even have TCP/IP connection points (it would
be foolish not to co-opt it right from the start), but the rules would
make some sense, and people will have a chance to get what they want
for the mere exchange of money (apologies to those who consider this
very thought anathema.)
The really sick thing is that those prone to nostalgia will then spend
the decade after the death of the internet wringing their hands over
how the internet was technologically superior (or could have been) to
whatever it was that replaced it. They won't get it. As someone who
understood marketing and human psychology once said:
Almost no one has ever wanted a 1/4" drill bit, all they
ever wanted was a 1/4" hole.
Following this analogy the supposed vanguard of the internet is
primarily comprised of drill-bit theoreticians who would like to make
holes illegal out of fear that anything less will dull their beautiful
bits.
-Barry Shein
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