Let's not forget that Minitel couldn't be as great as it was if not for its complete and utter centralization.
Sometimes having twenty slightly different services that are blocked from interoperating for the sake of some abstract notion of privacy isn't that great after all.
It was not, in fact, totally centralized. In the early 90s, my middle school had a server that you could phone into to get the weather (I don't quite remember if it was a full forecast or not, I think it was), and that server was managed by a Maths teacher and students who would enter the school ½h/1h earlier to grab the data and update the page. I guess you could say that was my first experience as what would later be called webmastering.
It was still centralized in the sense that you had to connect to a server because a Minitel had no computing and no storage (so no p2p). Benjamin Bayart's "Internet libre ou Minitel 2.0?" goes to great length to explain the consequences of that.
Minitel was probably subject to substantial government regulation, unlike the "tech" companies that dominate the web and overinfluence the internet. Minitel was probably funded at least in part through taxation.
Certainly, Minitel was not a secretive Silicon Valley-styled company with dual class shares or other entrenching governance structures, that allow for concentration of voting power in the hands of company insiders, through disproportionate allocation of voting rights among shareholders.
It seems the French do not have the same hatred of telecom that Amercians do.
Regardless of the public opinion toward telecom, it has historically been subject to far more regulation than so-called "tech" companies operating websites. Sadly, some of today's telecom companies try to emulate or piggyback on the privacy violating behaviour of "Big Tech".
Centralisation/decentralisation is an interesting debate, but if the issue is privacy then, IMO, one also needs to consider the question of regulation/deregulation.
Perhaps Minitel was an example of a regulated, government-supported public computer networking service that worked very well.
Silicon Valley and its charlatan ideology is a privacy disaster. It is probably a threat to the survival of democratic societies as we know them.
> It seems the French do not have the same hatred of telecom that Amercians do.
Oh yes we do. France Telecom back in the day wasn't all that bad, but the prices were crazy: copper is expensive but not so much that you should pay every month dozens of francs (before the euro, don't remember the exact number) without even paying for usage. But at least from what i remember tech support and intervention times were decent before the Internet, then came Wanadoo and then the privatization of France Télécom into Orange and now we have shitty service like everyone else.
I think 15 ff/ hour (about 2.5euros), if memory serves me well for a local call. Minitel was more expensive ( 3615 i think was typically closer to 15 euros/hour.
Sometimes having twenty slightly different services that are blocked from interoperating for the sake of some abstract notion of privacy isn't that great after all.