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Hold on, the end of the Minitel? Nothing less? Because when I look at the main Minitel page there is no such thing. Plus it seems to me that if the Minitel network would stop working I would have heard about it quite a lot from my family, on TV and I'm sure we would have returned the terminal to France Télécom, not to mention that the Slashdot article would have been edited.

It rather seems that the news is rather about some particular online (on the web) service, not the end of the network itselves.

The developers plan to make Quaero available on all platforms, including PCs, mobile devices and digital TVs.

In france you could get a Minitel device, like teletext but much more interactive
Minitel.

I remember reading before the internet that France had some internet for their country. It was much like our gopher system in the early days of the internet. But everyone was identifiable, and they could remove useless content. I think I remember reading it is still popular and is in use. I wish I could remember the name of it.

minitel

As another poster pointed out, the idea isn't ridiculous on the face of it: think of the Ford/Toyota example.

I don't think the court is suggesting that nobody could buy a link on the word "Ford." Rather, nobody who competes with Ford could buy such a link.

If you want to advertise the collected works of Harrison Ford on DVD, you could buy links that show up with searches for "Ford."

However, Toyota couldn't buy those links.

It sounds to me like Google would have to do a lot more screening of their ads. But they're smart folks, they can probably figure it out.

Linking their servers into MiniTel to get the French trademark list will be another challenge. ;-)

PS - Homework: If Harrison Ford does a Toyota commercial in France, can Opel buy an ad on French-language searches for "Ford?"

Minitel is as a good demonstration of what the world would be without the internet and it's open philosopy. Minitel's intelligence is all in the network, and all of it's publications are tightly controlled by a central authority. They did a fine job, arguably as good as could be done this way. While many useful servcices can be offered, they miss out on the blessings of liberty. Even under tight controls, the thing has evolved in ways they did not expect. We know that evolution is stunted from the services that people have invented for the web. The closest thing we have to that control here is M$ and their death grip on their platform. The world wide web is not only difficult to use under their naked browser, it's dangerous. Free browsers work better at getting the content you are intersted in while protecting the privacy and eyballs of the user. The less central control that's had in electronic publishing, the better off we all are.

The BT patent comes from a previous generation of technology, which included Ceefax, Prestel, and Minitel. Ceefax and Prestel are dead, but millions of Minitel terminals are still out there; France Telecom uses them instead of phone directories. You can click on the link above and download a Minitel emulator, which allows you to emulate a 16-color block graphics terminal inside a web browser. From there, you can access the telephone directory of France or the Minitel services directory. Most of the services are pay, and at sizable per-minute rates. That sort of fee structure was characteristic of those first-generation systems deployed by telcos.

It's little-known, but Telecom France actually deployed Minitel in the US. There were dial-in ports in all major cities. There were even some English-language services. I had an account for about a year around 1989. International text chat for around $0.06/minute, which was good back then.

> Again: where is europe years behind?

Europe is years behind when it comes to recognize, adopt and market competive innovation. Europe stands for MiniTel and Bildschirmtext versus The Web

• They were **THE** pionneers in instituting an online society.
  More than 20 years ago, they decided to implement the fabled Minitel in order to eliminate paper telephone directories.
• They're not anglo-saxons.
  So the french don't have that innate distrust of the State. Thus, they not only do not continually question what the State does, but they don't view working for the State as something demeaning, so the best minds are naturally attracted to work for the State so everyone benefits.
• De Gaulle did not like using a phone.
  He himself took maybe three phone calls a year, and made perhaps only one (on a good year) phone call on the same year (he didn't have a phone on his desk). Therefore, telephone infrastructure lagged sorely behind most countries (and was the butt of cruel jokes, like Fernand Raynaud's fabled: "Hello New-York, gimme the 22 at Asnières", which is said to have humiliated french telephone network engineers more than anything else. So, upon De Gaulle's resignation, the authorities embarked into a record-breaking research program to enhance the french phone network.
  The retarded phone network was a blessing in disguise, because in most cases, switches simply bypassed mechanical switching and they went from manual operators straight to digital packet-switching.
  This gave France a head-start in digital communications, which enabled them to quickly implement the Minitel network.
• They're catholics
  The french didn't have much choice but either to listen to the priests or to dump them, which is what they've been doing en masse for the last 200 years or so. (By contrast, a protestant can either find a sect that tells him what he likes, or simply make-up one of his own)
  Republican ideals naturally spurns religion as something which enslaves humanity, so the State is quite rigorously insulated from the church. Official education is strictly non-religious (law forbids teaching religion in public schools), so therefore, the french put much virtue in Science (and the fabled cartesian spirit also helps). So it is quite normal that the french will rigorously embrace new technology without having any philosophical qualms about it.
• French culture values intellectual achievement
  And it does so far more than financial success (you just can't get rid of the the old scatholic foundations...), so plenty of people are drawn into scientific studies. Scientists enjoy recognition and are respected. So, naturally, luddites do not really get listened to...
  This enables a great penetration of advanced technological ideas throughout society.
• The education system does not make specialists, but generalists.
  French scientists have a shallower knowledge that spans far more areas of interests, so they are more able to connect seemingly disconnected technologies together.
  A most successful and innovative american company has fully understood this idea. Researchers working for the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing company are forced NOT to spend 10 to 15% of their research budget on their primary research area. But they are quite free to spend it investigating side-effects discovered through their research. That's why they have so much innovative products.
• France values education and culture.
  Since then, it is only natural that education is freely available to anyone. The cream of the crop is also enrolled in the grandes écoles where they are given the best education for free, for which they then serve the State as the fabled highly-competent senior bureaucrates.

It's simple. I lived in France for 2 years and like the other posters said they do have a smaller population. But, consider aslo their government is more centeralized, there is little privitazation in the telcom industry and (this is the big one) they have the minitel http://www.minitel.fr/ system already in place. Granted is sucks, you have to pay for it and there is a huge gap between the haves and have-nots (just like in the US) but having a portal to the govt through a system that is already in most urban, Franch homes is not that much of a streach.

So what if [...] and there is a Frenchnet and an entirely separate Internet?

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Maybe its possible that you could learn something from this minitel homepage

"Let them use Minitel."

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