FranceNet

» see francenet.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Rafi Haladjian created FranceNet in April 1994 in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. France already had an internet provider by then: Oléane had been running since 1992, aimed at businesses that knew what they were buying. What FranceNet did was package the thing for a household, in a box, for people who had heard of the internet and had no idea what a stack was. The French Wikipedia entry credits it with the first consumer connection kit in the country, at a moment when there were about a hundred thousand French people online in total.

The company did not stay a dial-up seller for long. Its own page title came to describe it as an intégrateur Internet français, and the meta description behind that ran from network access all the way out to press relations. That is a web agency with a modem bank attached, which was a common shape for a 1990s European ISP and a sensible one: the access business was about to be commoditized and the hosting business was not.

By 2000 it had more than 160 employees and revenue of sixteen million euros. The same filing counts two data centers in Paris and over 200 corporate clients. Those numbers come from a BT regulatory announcement rather than from the company itself, which is where the figures for a private European ISP of this period usually have to be found.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ dialing from somewhere else ~

I came online in 1998, four years after FranceNet opened, through Turkish providers working the same problem at the same time with no idea the French ones existed. Every country ran this decade separately. France had its own handful of first providers and Turkey had another, none of them household names past their own borders. Nearly all of them were absorbed or switched off before broadband arrived.

~ May 1996 ~

On 8 May 1996 Libération ran a story about gendarmes arriving at French access providers. Two of them, FranceNet and Worldnet, had their management placed under formal investigation over the circulation of child abuse images carried in Usenet newsgroups their services relayed. The case ended in a dismissal, though sources disagree on the year it came.

The legal question underneath it had not been answered anywhere yet: whether the company moving the bytes was responsible for the bytes. France worked that out slowly and in public, and FranceNet was one of the test cases.

~ the name goes ~

FranceNet became Fluxus in 2000. The archive dates the switch tightly even though no source gives a day. On 7 April 2000 francenet.fr still served its own frameset, titled FranceNet, intégrateur Internet français. On 10 May 2000 the entire page was ninety-three bytes: an HTML header and a meta refresh pointing at fluxus.net. Every capture after that, for nearly two years, is the same redirect.

Fluxus did not last long either. On 8 May 2001 British Telecom announced its intention to contribute Fluxus S.A. to I.NET S.p.A., its majority-owned Italian web-hosting business, in exchange for more I.NET shares. The announcement is where the figures above come from, and it describes the company in a clause worth quoting for the shape of it: Fluxus, set up in 1994 and previously operating as FranceNet. Seven years of a company, reduced to a subordinate clause in someone else's filing.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »