What's this Minitel thing anyway

Outside of France most people never heard of the Minitel.

Released in 1981, first as a small scale test in Bretagne and then extended to the rest of the country, the Minitel business plan was a stroke of genius from France Telecom: Give the choice between the regular printed White Pages and a small dumb black and white terminal allowing you to find the same thing faster; then use the large number of available terminals to allow the creation of commercial offers to make a profit of it.

I moved to Norway the 2nd of Mai 2005, so this month was my fourth year in Norway.

At this exact moment I'm following the live feed from the French parliement (Assemblée Nationale) about the HADOPI law "Protection de la création sur Internet", and I have to say that I'm not impressed by this demonstration of democracy.