Lessons of the Forgotten 1981 Network Neutrality Debate

At around the time the internet was privatized, digital utopians such as John Perry Barlow considered government to be the greatest threat to the network. But the past twenty years have shown that the private sector could be an equally great threat, to network openness in particular. To wit, the net neutrality debate. This paper is a case study of the forgotten 1981 network neutrality debate. It builds on Andrew Russell's suggestion that "developments in data networking that took place outside the United States or that did not contribute neatly to the narrative of the Internet’s success should not remain overlooked and misunderstood." For all the hype notwithstanding, Tim Wu did not invent the concept of net neutrality. In 1978, the French PTT launched the "Minitel" network, which would become the world's first successful mass market online ecosystem, leapfrogging France into worlds of digital commerce, entertainment, and sex chat, all managed by independent content providers. By the late eighties, France was the world's most wired country. The Minitel experience prefigured most of the legal, economic, and industrial issues we face today in the context of the Internet. The concept of network neutrality was explicitly debated by regulators - only to be rejected upon pressure from...the incumbent press industry.Even as new entrants to the information market eventually thrived, their ability to innovate was constrained by a legal regime that had been put in place for political reasons under pressure from the press industry, significantly raising the cost of entry to the content producer market for independent innovators. Minitel has been derided by many U.S. scholars as the epitome of statism that precluded real and meaningful innovation from emerging from the edges; in contrast, the fully decentralized, open and neutral internet came and saved the day, the narrative goes -- in fact, the coincidental collapse of Minitel and rise of the Web is often presented as proof of the superiority of the American model of industrial policy: deregulation and an unbridled private sector lead to success, statism leads to failure. This narrative is not only simplistic, it is also dangerous for network openness because it posits that state intervention is tainted and suggests that unrestrained action by the private sector will by default promote innovation. This paper provides a counter narrative grounded in historical data, to fuel further thinking about what regulatory policies will better support independent, private innovation over the Internet. We uncovered previously classified archives from the legal services of the French Prime ministry and Communication's Ministry, which address network neutrality, in the context of Minitel, in terms that are conceptually very similar, when not identical, to those used today in the context of the Internet. Their content demonstrate that the PTT, far from promoting a statist, top-down position when it came to content creation and innovation, originally conceptualized the Minitel ecosystem a one that should be fully content neutral, with the PTT strictly acting as a common carrier. But the press industry lobby did not agree. It foresaw the impending demise of the printed press in the digital age, and waged a war against neutrality and free access to the network by would-be content providers using an effective appeal to fear as its public sphere rhetoric. While state advisors were supportive of a fully neutral Minitel upon which any citizen would have been free to publish without state interference, what emerged instead after the election of President Mitterrand in May 1981 was a non-neutral system featuring a regulatory regime of censorship enforced by the PTT and a publishing monopoly over Minitel granted to the incumbent press industry. This case study bears important lessons in the context of the current net neutrality debate: that appeal to fear (think "government takeover of the free Internet") is a powerful rhetorical tool, and that when the private sector's interests do not align with those of the people at large, private intervention can be a much greater threat to information networks' openness than government intervention.