OSNews

Usually services where acceded through kiosk number, the most used was 3615. The rate of 3615 services were like 10 € per hour. So a lot of minitels where decommissionned by their user because of the big invoice they received..

It was a real cash cow for state-owned France Telecom (FT), the only french operator at the time, and for the french state who funnelled a lot of FT profit to its budget.

So they had no that much interest in seeing Internet become generally available, the same applied to the editors of Minitel services, who also made a lot of money.

IMHO the telecom liberalization, which was decided at least european-wide, and especially the french regulatory agency allowed for widely available, cheap internet through ADSL. (they prevented FT to kill competition by using cheap price that only them could sustain, and forced FT to offer local loop unbundling at a reasonable price, BTW FT still has the monopoly of copper lines)

Not everything has changed, the french state is still the biggest FT shareholder and is suspected of influencing the regulatory agency for FT profit. IMHO they are not doing everything to help optical fiber penetration, as the concurrent can deploy their own lines without paying anything to FT (still, they often lend FT network sheaths

As for greediness: for the 2011 year FT shareholders perceived a dividend of € 4.4 billions, when the net profit was only of € 3.7 billions. (sic)

At the same time the mass-medias heavily publicized the distress of FT employees, who suffered a abnormally high suicide rate, and the french state expressed his profound sympathy for them. There weren't much media to point the fact that as the main shareholder the french state could be somewhat responsible for FT work condition degradation.