The Limits of Walled Gardens

Yet Minitel's strengths became its weaknesses as the 1990s progressed. The closed system that made it easy to launch services also made innovation difficult. While the World Wide Web exploded with multimedia content, Minitel remained limited to text and basic graphics. The centralized architecture that enabled simple billing also created a bottleneck for technical advancement.

More fundamentally, Minitel's Franco-centric nature limited its global potential. While Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web was designed as an open, international system, Minitel remained largely confined to France and a few French-speaking territories. Attempts to export the technology to other countries, including the United States and Japan, largely failed.

By the late 1990s, the contrast was stark. French internet adoption lagged behind other developed nations, partly because Minitel already provided many online services. Why struggle with dial-up internet when Minitel offered established, reliable services? This "good enough" syndrome would haunt French digital development for years.