Consider a farmers market. If a city builds and runs one, it must let all types of legal goods to be sold there for the infrastructure to provide maximum value. If citizens can only buy tomatoes and oranges, but not kale nor lettuce, then the value of the market is limited. The same is true of computer networks: If an internet service provider does not let content providers freely access the infrastructure that the user has rented (through a cable or cellphone subscription), the value of the internet as a whole becomes depleted. That’s why the American Minitel failed—and why people should be concerned about ISPs being able to restrict the traffic on broadband and wireless networks.

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On paper, 101 Online understood the distinction between an open, online platform and a cable TV bundle. In a press release, it outlined its mission: to provide Bay Area residents “with a powerful and efficient new way to communicate with each other.” The 101 Online forum, their rebranding of the Minitel network, was said to be “an electronic ‘meeting place’… the first widely available and cheap electronic medium that allows society to talk directly with itself without TV, radio and newspapers acting as a go-between.”

But in practice, 101 Online acted as a go-between for online content. Instead of letting content providers manage their own services, as France Telecom had done, it replicated the dominant model for U.S. online networks of the era: curating all the content itself. Individuals and companies couldn’t plug into the network and sell their content, goods, and services like their French counterparts had done, and as dotcom startups would soon do on the web. Instead, they had to travel to 101 Online’s office in downtown San Francisco, hand a floppy to an operator, and wait for its content to be converted to 101 Online’s proprietary format and uploaded to the company’s server.

As 101’s head of marketing would later admit, “we did not create an ecosystem enabling anyone but us to make money.” It wasn’t anything new for online systems available to Americans at the time. In a 1983, for example, the online version of the World Book Encyclopedia was removed from the CompuServe online platform and replaced with the Grolier electronic encyclopedia—probably the result of some behind-the-scenes licensing deal. The same year, The Source announced a new policy for curating the content on its platform: “new products are receiving close scrutiny based on likely long-term usage rates, as opposed to ‘attention getter qualities.’” It shouldn't come as a surprise that The Source chose to act as a curator, since it was the online arm of Reader’s Digest, itself a master curator. No more than it should startle anyone that AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon—all network providers who also own content companies—might want to do the same with the internet.