Ciudad Internet

» see ciudad.com.ar as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The shape repeats in every country. Some large domestic company that already owns something else, a newspaper or a cable network, works out that the telephone line is the next thing worth owning and puts its name on an internet service. In Turkey that was Türk Telekom on one side and Sabancı's Superonline on the other. In Argentina it was Clarín, the biggest newspaper in the country, and the service was called Ciudad Internet.

It opened in 1996, early enough to be one of the first things an ordinary Argentine could dial into. The owner was Prima S.A., the internet arm of Grupo Clarín, and the product was two things at once the way everything was in 1996: an access number you called with a modem, and a portal you landed on once the handshake finished. The address was ciudad.com.ar. The earliest surviving copy of it is from January 1999 and it is already a full portal, with postcards and chat rooms hanging off the sides.

By the middle of 2004 Prima had about 140,000 dial-up customers and 27.1 percent of the Argentine market, ahead of both Telefónica and Telecom on their own telephone lines. That is a strange thing for a newspaper to have achieved. It spent a hundred thousand dollars that year licensing compression software from a Canadian company so that dial-up would feel five times faster, then sold the result for a dollar twenty a month to people who could not get broadband.

I was on the Turkish version of this arrangement for years. Different flag, same handshake, same monthly bill going to a company whose main business was something other than the internet. What Ciudad had that my providers never managed was the second half of it, the portal, the thing that turns an access number into a country's front page.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the free years ~

Argentina got free dial-up in 2000, part of the same wave that hit most of the world in the same eighteen months. Alternativa Gratis and Fullzero arrived charging nothing for the connection and taking their money from advertising and from a cut of the per-minute phone call. Ciudad Internet was the paid incumbent staring at this.

Clarín's answer was to own both ends. Fullzero ended up inside the same group, which meant it could sell you a subscription or hand you the connection for nothing and still be the company on the other side of the line either way. By 2004 Alternativa Gratis was down around four percent of the market while Prima sat at twenty-seven. Owning both ends worked.

~ what broadband did to it ~

Dial-up brands are rarely killed by a competitor. They are made irrelevant by a different physical layer. Argentine broadband went from 295,000 connections in December 2003 to 350,000 by the middle of 2004 and kept climbing, and every one of those was somebody who no longer needed an access number at all. Clarín already owned the cable, through Fibertel, which had been selling broadband since 1997.

So the group consolidated. The Cablevisión and Multicanal fusion announced in September 2006 pulled Fibertel, Prima, Teledigital and Fullzero into a single structure. Ciudad Internet went into it as a brand rather than as a business, and the brand that came out the other side selling internet access was Fibertel.

~ the name that outlived the service ~

The homepage records when it happened. In September 2008 the title of ciudad.com.ar still read Ciudad Internet. By October it read Ciudad.com. Nobody announced anything. Two words came off the top of the page and the site carried on, which is how a brand ends when it belongs to a media group instead of to a company.

The address is alive in 2026 and it is entertainment now. Show business, television, whatever the group's channels are doing this week. The word Internet was dropped at exactly the point where being an internet company stopped being a claim worth making, and what was left underneath was a media property with a very good domain. Ciudad Magazine, Grupo Clarín's television channel, shares the name with it.

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