Club-Internet

» see club-internet.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

every country had one company whose email address people could not bring themselves to give up. the modem gave way to broadband and they moved to a new provider, and still the old address hung on for another decade, quietly forwarding. in turkey a lot of us carried a ttnet address around like that. in france the address was @club-internet.fr, and this is the company behind it.

club-internet launched on 11 october 1995, early enough that being online in france was still a thing you explained to people. it came out of lagardère, the media conglomerate, through a subsidiary set up to handle the group's online push. what it sold was the whole first-connection package of the time: a dial-up number and a cd of software that dropped you onto a walled portal, plus an email address that felt permanent. for a lot of french households it was the first door onto the web.

the story after that is mostly a story of owners. club-internet never really died as a service, it kept working the whole time. what changed was the name over the door, again and again, until one day the name was somebody else's and nobody had asked.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the ownership carousel ~

in february 2000 the german giant deutsche telekom folded it into t-online, its internet arm, and for a few years french customers were quietly deutsche telekom customers. it became a direct subsidiary in 2006, and in 2007 deutsche telekom decided it was done with france and put the whole thing up for sale. neuf cegetel bought t-online france for 465 million euros that june. two years later neuf cegetel itself vanished into the sfr brand. at no point did the person paying the bill each month have to do anything, and at every point the company they were paying had a different name.

~ the postmortem ~

the actual death was an email migration. on 10 june 2009 the @club-internet.fr addresses were moved onto sfr's system, and that was the moment the brand was switched off for good, fourteen years after it started. there was no real funeral, because as an internet connection it had never once stopped working. it just kept the same wires and traded away its name one acquisition at a time until nothing with that name was left. the people who still had a club-internet address kept it a while longer, the way people do, a small dead brand living on in the corner of an inbox.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »