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The thing is, we did have telcos and others provide siloed services. AOL being the big one, but also things like Prodigy, Compuserve, French Minitel, etc. What I wonder about is, would an Internet-like system have arisen anyway just because it's such a better ux? You saw a development like that with Fidonet for example but I think the Internet stole its oxygen.

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We did have that well into Internet years because some services where not there yet. I give you an example: I worked for one of the early 3G providers (2003-). YouTube is from 2005. We developed and run streaming video services because our customers did not have any meaningful source of videos to watch, so we had to build that and other services to drive the sales of our phone contracts. Mobile web sites were not a thing for a few more years so we had news and meteo and many other things. Our little private internet. Then YouTube became big, other services were born and became big too, all phone companies basically became internet providers.

Without IP protocols we probably would not even be born as a company. BBSes on analog modems or GSM data would be all we had.

Minitel was offered by France Télécom, then a government-operated service, under what was originally the Ministry of Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones. (The name "Minitel" is not short for "ministry of telecommunications", but rather Médium interactif par numérisation d'information téléphonique. Though I suspect some advantageous ambiguity was exploited.

France Telecom was privatised during the 1990s with the aquisition of the Orange Group, its current (commercial) branding.

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