Altern.org

» see altern.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The French web of the 1990s was a room I could see into and never enter. Not because of the network, which reached Ankara the same as anywhere, but because it was written in a language I did not read and indexed by search engines built for people who did. Altern.org was one of the most important things in that room and I learned its name two decades late, working backward from a court case.

Valentin Lacambre had already built a Minitel gateway to the internet, 3615 INTERNET, before he started giving away web space in 1992. The terms were close to nonexistent. Nothing to pay, and no advertising injected into your pages. He also took no editorial position on what you put up. By the end it was carrying 21,893 sites. Most were personal pages, and a large number were the kind of political material that exists specifically because no commercial host wants to be seen carrying it.

That was the offer and it was also the exposure. Every free host of the period was quietly betting that nobody would hold it responsible for the contents of a stranger's home page. Altern lost that bet first, in public, and the judgment landed on French law rather than on Lacambre alone.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the case ~

In 1998 someone scanned photographs of the model Estelle Hallyday out of a magazine and put them on a page hosted at Altern. She sued. The interesting part is who she sued: not the person who scanned the images and not the magazine, but the host who had never seen the page and was not being paid to carry it.

The court agreed with her. Lacambre was ordered to pay 300,000 francs in provisional damages plus 30,000 in costs, and the appeal upheld the principle that a host answers for what it stores. A settlement in April 1999 brought the money down to 70,000 francs. The money was never really the point. The ruling meant that anybody hosting a stranger's page in France was now expected to read it and to carry the legal risk of judging it wrong.

~ the day the sites went dark ~

More lawsuits followed, which is what happens once a precedent exists. Lacambre could not read 21,893 sites and had no interest in becoming a censor of them, so in early July 2000 he closed the free hosting service and everything on it stopped resolving. It was not a company running out of money or an acquirer switching off a product. It was one person deciding the terms of the job had changed into something he would not do.

Weeks later France passed a law with an article on host responsibility written into it. The legal question Altern died over got answered eventually, and the eventual answer, in France and then across Europe, was closer to what Lacambre had argued: a host that does not know is not liable until it is told. He was right about four years too early to benefit from it.

~ the next chapter ~

Three hosting projects came out of the wreckage directly, run as associations rather than businesses so that no single person carried the exposure again. The control panel Lacambre had written to run Altern was released as free software under the name AlternC and is still used by small hosts that want to hand out accounts without becoming a company.

Lacambre went and cofounded Gandi, the domain registrar, and sold his share in September 2005 as part of a 13.35 million euro exit. There is a temptation to read that as a happy ending, and it is not quite one. The registrar survived because registering a name is a service nobody expects you to have read. The thing he actually built, a place where anybody could publish without asking, is the thing that could not be defended.

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