The “Web of pros” in the 1990s: The professional acclimation of the World Wide Web in France

Abstract

This article, focusing on France, explores the notion of a “Web of professionals” and seeks to establish its factual, epistemological, and methodological implications for the history of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. This research reflects on the promises of the New Economy and the roles of the various controversies, cultures, imaginaries, and forms of mediation affecting the business world in its appropriation of the Web. It also aims to reappraise the individual and collective stakeholders whose active part has been somehow underestimated or obscured by the image of the mass Internet user. The professionalization of Web activities, the development of a new generation of entrepreneurs and the conversion of business models to online practices are all significant parts of the emergent Web culture in France, as well as factors contributing to this emergence.

Keywords

1990s born digital heritage controversies France history imaginaries new economy professionalization stakeholders web web archives

Historical research on the role of business professionals in the adoption and spread of the World Wide Web remains scarce, in spite of the inspiring work of pioneering researchers (Abbate, 2010; Aspray and Ceruzzi, 2008). While the trend today is to promote lead users and bottom-up initiatives (Von Hippel, 2009), professional user-developers would not seek to overturn approaches based on multistakeholderism or on the co-construction approach highlighted by historiographers. This lack of visibility can, however, be explained by several factors: entire segments of the history of the Web are still to be tackled, and moreover the topic suffers from a lack of historical focus on businesses/companies, in spite of the material available on digital cultures of this kind and the many opportunities for linking cultural and economic history, as was done in Fred Turner’s (2008) research on Stewart Brand or by Finn Brunton (2013) in his work on spam. Research by Megan Sapnar Ankerson (2009) on Web design and by Matthew Crain (2013) on online advertizing has also opened up promising new paths for the analysis of Web professionals and their tools.

There are several reasons why the study of the World Wide Web of the 1990s should include professionals. First, the Web would not have developed as it has without Internet service providers (ISPs) and domain name registrars and these constitute a technical and human infrastructure, which will need to be assessed over time. Second, it is worth recalling that in 1999 an estimated 5.66 million French people over the age of 15 were Internet users; 57% of these accessed it from home, 15% from school, and 45% from work (Janin, 2000). Almost half of Internet connections took place in the workplace, and home computers were only significantly present after 1997 (Rouquette, 2000). In the same period, the “New Economy” sparked a number of reports from state bodies, while new trade associations and new career paths began to appear. Investigating the corporate aspect of the Web also provides an opportunity to immerse ourselves in the concerns of the time: in the late 1990s, management sciences and the sociology journal Réseaux began to tackle the issue of the Web (Gensollen, 1999; Licoppe, 2000). Finally, both personal computers and the French Minitel videotext service have shown how the business world influenced the development and adoption of new digital technologies (Schafer and Thierry, 2012): this influence has yet to be examined or quantified in the case of the World Wide Web.

The notion of a “Web of professionals” is admittedly a fairly broad one, as it encompasses a variety of areas and experiences. In the 1990s, roles, positions, and borders within the Web were not yet stable; thus, the present research could not be limited solely to the notion of a “corporate Web.” An illustration of how ill-defined these roles were can be found in the case of Patrick Robin. CEO of the online advertizing agency ROL (Régie On-Line), he was also the founder and CEO of ImagiNet, which had been offering network access and hosting services to business clients since 1995. In addition, he was publishing director for CD-Média and Internet Reporter. This is an example of the lack of differentiation between business sectors and activities dedicated to the Internet or more specifically to the Web, which could equally take the form of small and medium-sized enterprises (Yolin, 1998) or of large corporations transitioning to the “New Economy” and the “professional Internet” (Simeray, 1995). As noted in the Report on the New Economy, which illustrates the widespread circulation of Alan Greenspan’s ideas, this concept

doubtlessly owes its success to the fact that it identifies under the same term the new, bubbling sector of information and communication technologies (the “ITCs”) and a new approach to the economy as a whole. In its narrower sense, the “new economy” covers 5% of French GDP (and 8% of US GDP). In its broader sense, it can include all forms of practice, that is to say, in the long term, the entire economy. (Cohen and Debonneuil, 2000: 9)

The aim of our study is thus to understand what is shared (in terms of culture, imaginaries, practices, and usages) by these professionals and to question the notion of “professionalization” in addition to that of the domestication of technologies. It should be noted in this regard that early adopters of the Internet and of the Web were caught in a dynamic interweaving of the strictly speaking domestic and the professional. Producers and consumers could scarcely be distinguished from one another, as the new technology acclimated itself to the French context. We shall also see how an approach through the notion of professionalization allows us to draft a “history of processes,” which will account for individual and collective trajectories beyond dichotomies such as supply versus use and top-down versus bottom-up.

To that end, this research is based on sources as varied and heterogeneous as its topic. These included interviews (with ISP and hosting service professionals¹), a large collection of mainstream (Le Monde, Le Point, Le Figaro, etc.) and professional press sources (InternetActu and Planète Internet in particular), TV and documentary film archives (shows like Capital and Envoyé Spécial, France 2 newscasts from 1994 to 1998), reports published on the topic in the 1990s,² as well as research into French online newsgroups and Web archives (Brügger, 2009). This diversity allowed us to work on several scales—macro and micro, collective and individual—in order to define the field of research and the study as a whole.

The professional Web: a nebula

The issue of the role played by computer technologies in economic growth has long been considered in literature through what has been called “Solow’s paradox,” after the economist’s well known statement in 1987 that: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” (Cohen and Debonneuil, 2000: 10)

In the mid-1990s, the question of the role of computers was raised anew, as the Internet and the Web introduced a new environment which French companies were sometimes slow to explore. While the famous catalog merchant Les 3 Suisses offered a selection of online fashion articles and videos as early as 1995, this was still the exception rather than the rule. It was only at the very end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s that we saw the introduction of dedicated online retailers: iBazar and Cdiscount in 1998, Kelkoo and RueDuCommerce in 1999.

Locating and quantifying

It is difficult to give an account of the online presence and Web use of professionals in the 1990s because of the diversity of the available sources which can help us itemize the individual and collective stakeholders, and also because readily available categories (professionals, private individuals, professional use, personal use) fail to give an accurate description of a complex and shifting reality.

One useful point of entry is that of domain names, and the statistics provided by the Association Française pour le Nommage Internet en Coopération (AFNIC), which published a directory where brands (.tm) and professionals were well represented.³ The association took over the attribution of the national top-level domain name (TLDN) “.fr” and its sub-domains (.tm.fr, asso.fr, etc.) from the Network Information Center hosted at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, which had managed TLDNs since 1987 (Beltran and Griset, 2007). Of the requests it processed in 1997, 81% were for “.fr” names, 12% for “.tm.fr,” 3% for “.asso.fr,” and 1% for “.presse.fr” domains (AFNIC, 1998). But this distribution cannot be considered a perfect tool for differentiating between professional and personal domain acquisition: not all professionals have their own brands, and the choice by a number of companies of a “.fr” or “.com”⁴ domain rather than “.tm.fr” can only be attributed to the issue of trade marks. In 1998, the Web presence of numerous professionals was signaled by a “.fr” domain: Aéroports de Paris, with “aeroport.fr,” the local federations of court bailiffs (“dep76.huissier-justice.fr,” etc.), and even Wanadoo, the ISP subsidiary of France Télécom, created in 1995. Such porosity between types of domain name does not facilitate the historian’s task.

Naming and identifying

As a new and imported technology, the Web began to be introduced into business during a decade when the experiences of personal and office computing had not been fully assimilated. Neither a fixed lexicon nor a clear delineation yet existed within professional networks, company structures, or training provision: the World Wide Web’s developing potential is thus not easily identifiable from primary sources.

At the very end of the decade, the Club Informatique des Grandes Entreprises Françaises (CIGREF) postponed until 2000 the creation of an “Internet Metrics” designed to measure Internet penetration in the organization of its member companies (CIGREF, 1999a). Notably deemed outside the scope of 2000 nomenclature was the position of webmaster, with the observation that “this position is non-existent in most large companies, or is mistaken for that of publication manager, a position strictly equivalent to that of online editor” (CIGREF, 1999b). The previous year’s Report on the New Economy (Cohen and Debonneuil, 2000) made only one mention of the Web, noting that “traditional” retailers would have to face a new, paperless form of competition.

Measuring the phenomenon thoroughly and defining different uses as these were created are no easy tasks for analysts, especially when, as is often the case, activities were created before the language to describe them. Furthermore, for both companies and independent professionals, a Web presence was only one among various objectives and practices. The 1998 Yolin Report paints a picture of very diverse practices: email and discussion forums, “IP” phones, information gathering “through Web ‘browsing,’” often with the help of search engines (software solutions specializing in “competitive economic intelligence” had also recently appeared), and, ever since Minitel, the use of databases (Schafer and Thierry, 2012), as well as BtoB communication.

Among these new practices, it was Internet sales that garnered the most interest among analysts and entrepreneurs alike. By contrast with videotext, with its lucrative market based both on retail sales and on information access,⁵ the Web sometimes seemed less attractive to investors, as free access to websites was problematic. In 1996, the revenue from Minitel-based commerce was 12.6 billion francs, “a higher figure than that for Internet revenue worldwide” in the same year (Yolin, 1998). In the 1990s, France was losing the race precisely because it had previously been a frontrunner, and by 2000 only 2% of French households had ever bought a product online, while the equivalent figure in the United States was 17%, and 10% in Great Britain.

With a profusion of developing practices, potential risks and possible benefits were equally hard to quantify. Cédric Curtil (1996) saw the advent of the World Wide Web as a revolution in information circulation, while Nicholas Garnham and Marie-Christine Gamberini (2000) tempered the hopes placed in a harmonious and profitable implementation of the “information society” and in new technological horizons viewed in terms of a “transition from mass production to flexible production” and “from the vertical bureaucracy to the horizontal firm” (p. 3). The economic model for this transition was still, however, unclear.

Classifying

Soft concepts such as “connected business” and “information society” are very inefficient descriptors of the nuances of the evolution of professional practices. With a few exceptions (Stenger, 2004), studies of companies or economic sectors still dedicate only a few pages to how organizations and their stakeholders adapt. Yet, it is possible, through reports, Web archives, and interviews, to draw up a typology both of stakeholders and of processes of adaptation.

A first and mandatory category is that of the “small fish,” who since the first years of the 1990s had contributed to the professionalization of the Web. Often driven by a pioneering vision, and influenced by the do-it-yourself (DIY) personal computing culture of the previous decade, they made it their mission to build the tools they needed for their own work (Thierry, 2012). Laurent Chemla and Valentin Lacambre, two of the co-founders in 1999 of Gandi (Gestion et attribution des noms de domaine/Domain Names Attribution and Management), are among the list of entrepreneurial activists who considered the Web and the Internet as resources to be shared, and proudly declared themselves information “thieves” (Chemla, 2002) committed to providing access for as many people as possible. The free hosting service provider Altern.org, founded in 1992 also by Valentin Lacambre, would fall victim to the first attempts at Internet regulation: it became the target of several legal actions, notably that of fashion model Estelle Halliday, who sued after an Internet user, “Silversurfer,” posted photos taken from other websites and scanned from magazines on his personal page. These images were then re-published by the magazine Entrevue under the title “Found on the Internet” and citing the website address and AlternB as its host (Chemla, 1999).

Alongside the small fish there were also “sharks,” seasoned predators of the Internet seas and ready to dominate the new market. France Telecom, for example, was slow to transition to the Internet, after being a major player in the development of Minitel. Its strategy was chiefly one of absorption, as exemplified by its acquisition of Oléane in March 1998. Jean-Michel Planche, former owner of this successful ISP, recalls that

I admit I was seduced by a speech from [France Telecom CEO] Michel Bon, who explained how he wanted to transform the “whale” that was France Telecom into a school of smaller fish. We were all too familiar with the hardships of operating as ISPs, and becoming one of many fish in a school was a much more appealing prospect than succumbing to those other, foreign, sirens that sought to lure us into their fold and ultimately make us mere ciphers in a strategy devised elsewhere. (Deblock, 2008)

An appealing vision indeed; however, the whale can, in retrospect, be more accurately defined as a shark, and the synergy proposed as akin to that which sometimes exists between sharks and pilot fish. Another example worth mentioning is the acquisition for 24 million Euros in 2000 by Vivendi—another late-comer to the Web—of the name “vizzavi,” then used by the three owners of a Parisian bar turned cyber-cafe (Mazurier, 2000).

What distinguishes France in terms of professional digital culture and of the market is the dominance of Minitel as an economic model and its lucrative pricing system based on connection time (Thierry, 2013). The transition to the Internet, where the information provider obtained no direct financial recompense, was seen as a move to a new, uncertain, and uncomfortable fish tank, or even as a dive into the abyss. This was the perception, in particular, of both private and public companies with major income from Minitel. As a pioneer of online booking in the 1980s, the national railroad company, SNCF, was reluctant to transition to a Web-based service offering no direct profit. Laurent Chemla (2002) notes that

There came a day long ago now—on the compressed scale of Internet time—when a CNRS researcher noticed that the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français offered no facility for online consultation of train schedules […]. So this researcher, acting for the greater good, undertook to write the few lines of code allowing SNCF schedules to be posted online […]. Unfortunately, the SNCF pressured the CNRS into shutting down the website, which was hosted on one of its servers. Profits from the very expensive 3615 SNCF Minitel service were worth much more than the mere satisfaction of travelers.

In spite of the temptation to swim against the tide, online services did gradually begin to appear, with the influence of foreign initiatives (notably the German railroad company) and changes in the habits of individuals, who increasingly sought to use their personal computers.

When the time came for a new “fish tank,” a number of stakeholders were still trying to hold on to their old ways; for example, the bank Crédit Agricole de Loire Atlantique charged 3 francs per connection for online bank statements. Others, however, understood that the visibility offered by the Web, largely due to its free access, could be exploited: Minitelorama, the operator of the very lucrative 3615 AVENDRE and 3615 ALOUER, was one such company, transforming itself as early as 1995 into avendrealouer.fr, the first French real estate website.

We could also include other categories in this typology of stakeholders, distinctive for their appropriation of the World Wide Web and their reaction to the loss of Minitel revenues: some companies, like Infonie, established a closed system, keeping Internet users within their own “fishing net.” Such strategies tend to demonstrate, in any case, differing levels of comfort with the small pond of Minitel and with the ocean of the Web.

The wave of Internet euphoria

Above and beyond the important differences from one business and institution to another, the “digital conversion” of the pioneers was based on a strong faith in the New Economy. The success of start-ups, stock options, and rapidly acquired wealth were highlighted by TV programs about the “miracle businesses” of the Internet, a far cry from the shadowy realms analyzed by Gina Neff (2012) in Venture Labor. Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. The case of Fabrice Grinda is a good example: in July 1998, he co-founded aucland.fr, an online auction website which showed spectacular growth in France and Europe, with several millions of francs in support from Groupe Arnault. Young and entrepreneurial, a recent Princeton graduate and convert to the American dream, Grinda became a regular on prime-time shows; he appeared in 2000 in an economy-themed edition of Capital on the topic of “A qui profite Internet?” (Who Profits from the Internet?) and was the focus of an Envoyé Spécial documentary. Just as Bill Gates was presented as an idol for small companies, taking as his motto the notion that “it’s the fast who eat up the slow, not the big who swallow the small,” Grinda was unapologetic in describing the 2 years that made his dazzling success.

National reports showed more nuance, as suggested by one titled, “Internet and Small Businesses: Mirage or Opportunity?” (Yolin, 1998). The French state was by then looking to find its own place in a landscape of deregulation, and in a system of both libertarian and liberal ideologies.

Promises of the new economy

Former Director-General of Telecommunications Gérard Théry (1994) drafted in 1994 a governmental report on “information highways,” where he referred to Al Gore’s earlier statements in the United States (p. 11) and concluded that the competitiveness of the national economy was at stake. Thierry Breton (1994) wrote that online services should at the very least increase in value from 32.7 billion francs in 1993 to 63.5 billion in 2000 and 120 billion in 2010. While the importance of the Web was not yet entirely understood, that of the “New Economy” certainly was.

A total of 2 years later, the Association française de la télématique multimédia, (AFTEL)⁶ (1996) published a White Book that openly referred to the Internet; the figures highlighted were global ones, it being difficult for analysts to focus on the very few examples of successful French initiatives. After Exco & Grant Thornton International’s 1997 study of European small and medium-sized business (SMBs),which placed France in last place for Internet use, Yolin (1998) could only argue that 1997 was the year when things took off there, noting that 20% of small and medium-sized enterprises were by then “at least a bit connected to the Internet.” Francis Lorentz (1998) noted shortly afterwards, “If we were to draw a caricature of the situation, the electronic battle for e-commerce comes down to a race between a French business driving at 6 mph against 80 American businesses going at 120 mph.” Was France a late-comer to the information highway, or was it their tolls that restricted access? However, among smaller companies, some began from nothing and took seriously the adage that “with the Internet you can be small and look big”:

It could even be noted that in most cases successful Web developments in large private companies would be credited to a “maverick” employee acting without the support of (and sometimes opposed by) his superiors. A powerful IT department is generally considered a handicap to early development, as is an influential communication department, which may emasculate an Internet development strategy by relegating it to the domain of appearances. [… W]hen we came to congratulate LCI [TF1 24 hrs newscast subsidiary] on its [online] success, it became clear that the channel didn’t know who initiated the effort. (Yolin, 1998: 4)

Yet the stakes were too high for companies to rely only on “mavericks” and the “self-made Web.”

From information highways to the information society

A 1999 report by Jean-François Abramatic, titled “The Technical Development of the Internet,” underlined how France was falling behind. The days of “Colbertist mercantilism” (what Cohen called in 1992 “high-tech Colbertism”) had passed, but the government was still trying to stimulate the development of new services. Christian Perret, Secretary of State for Industry, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Minister of Economy from 1997, launched an “Information Society” program funded to the tune of 300 million francs and designed to support the development of innovative services (secured payment, online wallets, etc.) and an “Internet-SMB” program granted 50 million francs in 1998. A first call for proposals, published on 25 November 1994, as well as invitations in February 1996 from the Ministry of Industry and the National Agency for the Promotion of Research, had highlighted both the expectations and the innovatory capacity of small businesses, with 600 proposals being submitted (Trégouët, 1998).

The Lorentz Report (1998) highlighted the fact that other countries had followed proactive policies, in particular the United States after Vice-President Gore’s speech on information highways (Gore, 21 December 1993). The US state program called “The Internet of the New Generation,” the recommendations expressed in the Magaziner Report of July 1997, and a free-market approach were all mentioned, as well as the notion that online commerce was an opportunity to complete the European single market.

Yet, in spite of incentives and a relaxation of regulations, many French entrepreneurs preferred to leave the country. Wondering what young, innovative French entrepreneurs found missing in their home country, René Trégouët (1998) stated,

The legitimate desire for monetary gain is not the only motivator: it seems that a need for personal fulfillment is also at play, a need easier to satisfy in the United States where society is more acceptant of success. And on the other hand, there is a higher tolerance for failure, which makes risk-taking easier.

“Start simply, grow fast” and its limited applicability

While some tried out their luck in America, others found varying degrees of success in France. With some irony, Laurent Chemla (2002) notes,

Evidently, Gandi is not a start-up. It has been profitable from day one, so it’s not a typical business of the new economy! For further proof, see how neither Gandi nor any of its managers appear in the Journal du Net list of the 500 Internet players “who matter.” It has to be that a company must reach a certain level of losses to matter … (p. 29)

Not all French businesses shared the same level of enthusiasm for the “Web rush.” On one hand, Daniel Kaplan remembers Francis Lorentz’s government mission to online commerce:

We crisscrossed the country looking for businesses, when it was said in Paris that there were 200 to 300 sites of online commerce. […] In reality, 3,000 to 4,000 companies were already active in this sector by 1997. (Schafer, 2012)

On the other hand, transitions to the Web were often made with circumspection. Statistics from Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) (2000) show that, by the end of 1999, 69% of industrial companies were connected, by contrast with the 28% in 1997, but only 39% had chosen to create a website. A total of 32% of these companies had designed their websites for corporate communication, while 25% used them for online transactions. In the latter case, websites essentially offered information and a catalog of products (online secure payment was only being implemented by 3.4% of businesses).

Stumbling blocks on the way to the Internet and the Web seemed numerous. On the basis of testimonies in the Yolin Report, on the online forum devoted to the Lorentz Report,⁷ and on newsgroups conversations,⁸ the most notable causes of concern appeared to be doubts about the efficacy and legitimacy of the technology,⁹ the idea that the Web was only a fad, fears of “spies” and “pirates,” a feeling of information overload, lack of time and know-how, the fast pace of technological change, connection charges and, in parallel, the always suspect lack of fees for website access, as well as slow connections, and the fear that the network might collapse under the weight of increasing traffic. For some, the Internet appeared as a new frontier, fraught with lawlessness (fears of hacking, viruses, cookie issues, spam mailing, etc.), while others swore exclusively by Minitel and its segmented pricing system.¹⁰ Competing with a shared French Minitel culture and an established business model, the advocates and promoters of the Web needed to create their own common culture.

A shared culture?

In addition to introducing new economic and informational models and new models of interaction, in the 1990s the World Wide Web was sanctioning and consolidating a culture claimed as their own by many of the individuals actively involved. In this respect, it is interesting to identify what were then the watchwords and the fault-lines, as well as the language used for the socialization of this technology.

Disruptions and gateways

For historians, reconstituting the “Web culture” amounts to finding a coherence between experiences and discourses that originally were independent and subsequently became shared, allowing the culture to be understood and accepted.

The discovery of the Internet and the Web by its early advocates is described as a moment of something close to epiphany in the longer timeframe of experiences with technology (Thierry, 2012). Jean-Michel Billaut, who founded in 1993 a think tank on the place of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in society, the Club de l’Arche, in the documentary Quand l’Internet fait des bulles describes his first stroll into the Net as an experience out of time: “It was 7pm, I told myself ‘I’ll have a look.’ And when I looked at my watch, it was midnight.”¹¹ Pierre Chappaz, CEO of Kelkoo,¹² describes a similarly shocking experience, the discovery of a new continent, of something he had been awaiting “for twenty years,” without knowing quite what it was.

Experiencing the Internet for the first time establishes a before and an after; it also led to the shared belief that what was being discovered was not only a goldmine, but a small corner of the American dream now accessible from France. In the same documentary, Patrick Robin reminisces, “The Internet to us, it was the United States—all things considered it was all happening there.” He adds, “We felt like we had just struck gold …” By contrast, the actual economic impact was much less obvious. Transitioning from a closed, centralized Minitel to the promises of a wide open Internet was no easy task. In the 1990s, critics of the Kiosque voiced their discontent about the system’s lack of flexibility and its very high profitability for the telecom administration; but by the early 2000s, as the Web fell short of high expectations, hints of a backlash were appearing. On 1 October 2001, the daily Les Echos announced that “the young and ambitious of the Internet convert to Minitel” (Renault, 2001) in their search for a middle ground between “everything for free” with no profits and closed markets like WAP (Wireless Application Protocol, developed in France from 1999). This situation resulted not from any lack of possibilities or intuition: ROL, the first online media sales agency in France, offered as early as 1996 to buy advertizing space on over 30 French-speaking websites, having recognized that profitability was now based on the attention rather than the time of the user.¹³

Although the cultures of the professional Web and of online entrepreneurship were slow to become generalized in the course of the 1990s, a variety of means and tools—which provided a sense of community—were acting as conduits of information, and sometimes also of persuasion. Among such tools were associations. An association promoting ethics among French Web professionals, the Association déontologique des acteurs français de l’Internet (Adafi), was created in 1997 by 10 AOL competitors, along with the Association des fournisseurs d’accès (Afa) for service providers. These associations opened up a space for exchanging ideas, and also for establishing shared professional ethics, which developed as the Internet continued to grow and promoted self-regulation.

Organizations born of popular education initiatives in computer science and applications, such as Microtel, began in the mid-1990s to supplement their activities with introductions to the “building blocks of Internet understanding.”¹⁴ The early translation of US educational literature, for example Tracy Laquey’s (1995) book, can be seen as an acclimation of US technology. Indeed, the role of these associations may lead us to rethink the phenomena of circulation and convergence over a longer time period, and in light of work on other kinds of computer industries, such as micro-informatics and video games (Postigo, 2007).

Mainstream media played a role in the diffusion of vocabulary (pages, browsing, etc.) and relied on well-known figures to turn a still-distant technology into a more familiar phenomenon (Wizman, 1994), often through comparisons with Minitel (Kahn, 1997).

In the second half of the 1990s, the Web appeared as a topic (and as “the Internet”) in the specialist press covering self-training, gaming, and what was left of amateur programming after its glory days in the previous decade (Schafer and Thierry, 2012). As in the mainstream press, the focus was on the hardware necessary for access to the Network of networks and the risks were played down (by contrast with the television evening news, which presented causes for worry, from “Terrorism and the Internet” to “the Internet and child pornography”¹⁵).

Finally, the Net itself became a medium, for private and corporate users alike, for the sharing of experiences and for the constitution of knowledge and know-how,—the many newsgroups are testament to this function of the Internet.¹⁶ On the forum launched after the publication of the Lorentz Report (1998) on online commerce, experiences with online selling were shared: “just a few words to quickly describe what is going on in the Nord Pas de Calais region […] I was called crazy when, in late 2010, the first seminar on the INTERNET took place in LILLE!!!”¹⁷

Convergence in adversity

A dedicated press, regular meetings such as the First Tuesdays, where investors and project developers gathered every month, as well as a number of associations, were instrumental in the convergence of professionals. Their digital culture was also forged in the face of adversity and controversy. While Wanadoo embodied the counter-model of national telecoms for many ISPs and small hosting providers, its Executive Director Nicolas Dufourcq shared, in the documentary Quand l’Internet fait des bulles, their vision of an Internet free of government intervention. ISPs had been since their early days familiar with the courts and at the heart of a controversy still alive today, the issue of their liability for the contents they host, with ongoing developments concerning such matters as net neutrality and digital surveillance. The mid-1990s saw the first of a long list of legal battles involving Internet and Web players. Images of child pornography were published on a Usenet forum, which led to a complaint being filed against the ISPs in 1996. The managers of Francenet and Worldnet were soon under formal investigation and their facilities were searched, with intensive press coverage (the case was dismissed in 1999). In 1996, too, as a result of a complaint from the Jewish student association Union des étudiants Juifs de France about “Holocaust denying websites,” nine service providers were subjected to a summary hearing. The ISPs Renater, Eunet, Compuserve, Internet-Way, Calvacom, Francenet, Imaginet, Axone, Oléane were widely varied in origin, audience, and range of activities, but all now faced the same difficulties.

The professional world could no longer escape the broader social issues brought to the fore by the development of the digital world, such as the processing of personal data (Braibant, 1998); Minitel had been the first to experience such difficulties.

Rather than forecasts and long-term strategies, professionals tend to look for concrete and immediate action: many forum posts about the Lorentz Report showed concern about the excessive cost of Internet connections, communication signal quality, regulations (especially tax regulations), and cryptology.¹⁸ Interoperability and openness also took center stage in public discussions:

If network operators and public service providers apply a proprietary framework to the information they collect or produce, they will make the creation of added-value service impossible. It is clear that in deciding that no one can claim ownership of public data, France has made the profitability of the added-value services they want to implement a little less of a short-term prospect. But this limitation is essential to healthy competition and the development of services useful to all users. (Janin, 2000: 27)

It is hard not to read these lines as a foreshadowing of the current debate on open data …

Conclusion

Studying Web professionals in the France of the 1990s, their progressive familiarization with the use of the Internet and their online visibility, means addressing a broader and complex history, which is linked to the study of economic processes and of technologies, as well as to the study of representation, digital cultures, and the many disputes of the past decade.

An investigation into this period also shows that the role of professionals was not limited to the crudely depicted role of offering something that was then consumed—professionals and businesses were part of the collaborative construction of the network, of its technical reality, of its representation, and they play this role as both creators and users.

The study of the Web for professionals, and made by professionals, opens up new directions for research to come, as hinted at throughout this article. The predominance of discourses revolving around success carefully avoids the manifold failures of French entrepreneurial initiatives during the 1990s. Transformation since the days of telematics has been far from linear; the same can be said of creation “from scratch.” The assumption that the Web is a suitable space for small-scale, innovative, youth-driven, and youth-led businesses needs to be re-assessed; euphoric discourses on the Net economy need to be confronted with the realities of the start-up world.

We also need to explore the circulation of and continuities between different informatics communities, beyond the more evident links with micro-informatics and free software associations. Here again, the theme of technological conversion is an occasion for fine-tuning our understanding of the 1990s as the decade when the “micro-culture” gradually replaced the “Minitel culture.” Not only do continuities appear to be very important, given some examples of well-known entrepreneurs who started in telematics before turning to the Web, an undisputable “education in networks” on the part of telematics was also a factor. A promising point of contact between specialists in the digital world and education scholars may be found in the area of training (for both first-time and returning students), and in the analysis of its evolution (in schools and universities, but also its “professional” aspects, within companies themselves). Finally, the place of women and gender-related issues should also be thought of in the context of these (hi)stories, where few female entrepreneurs emerge; exceptions include Oriane Garcia (co-founder in 1994 of the Lokace search engine, and in 1997 of Caramail, the francophone Web portal and provider of free electronic addresses), and Anne-Sophie Pastel (co-founder in 1999 of aufeminin.com, a website hosting content destined specifically for a “feminine” public). During the 1990s, a dichotomy seems to have unfolded between the under-representation of women in Web companies, and the gradual increase in consideration given to the “feminine” sector of digital consumers (this perspective on video gaming e.g. is starting to receive full scholarly attention).

New perspectives are opened for Web history by studying the place of professionals within a space first created outside the remit of company concerns, and its adjustments to a national space where the history of digital products for the general public can be traced back to the 1980s. Bringing to light the issues of continuity, overlapping, and competition between two different technologies in France, following individual careers and collective trajectories, can help us to understand a decade when a technology of user-developers became a network for the general public, when the creation of the Web was more craft than industry, and when questions and choices about what the Web could and should be were still open. This endeavor allows us to grasp this history, not only from a “revolutionary” viewpoint, but from that of its gradual reception, assimilation, and contextualized “socialization.”

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR-14-CE29-0012-01).

Notes

Author biographies

Valérie Schafer is a researcher at the Institute for Communication Sciences (ISCC, CNRS/Paris-Sorbonne/UMPC, France). She has made the History of the Internet, the Web and digital cultures her research areas. Since 2014, she is head of the project Web90 (Heritage, Memory and History of the Web of the 1990s, ) supported by the French National Research Agency.

Benjamin Thierry is an associate professor of contemporary history at Paris-Sorbonne University and a researcher at the Institute for Communication Sciences (ISCC, CNRS/Paris-Sorbonne/UMPC, France). His research interests are history of man-machine communication and acclimation of digital artefacts into general public.

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