The early days of Internet were funded by the US government but not in the same way as Minitel. The French government massively subsidized the deployment of Minitel by giving away millions of terminals (in exchange for not giving the subscriber the white pages on paper) and that helped launch it.

But if you ignore the arguments about who funded what there are lots of aspects of Minitel that are interesting because it helped to kick off the wide use of smart cards, the underlying network was packet switched (X.25) and the servers handling Minitel were distributed through the network (so service providers ran their own services).

It wouldn't view Minitel as a failure, however, just because it was replaced by the web. The French were years (probably 10) ahead of the rest of the world in terms of electronic communication and commerce. They had a large internal market online in the 1980s handling a huge amount of commerce.