Freeler

» see freeler.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Freeler was not a startup. It was launched in September 1999 on the initiative of ING Bank, Postbank and Nationale-Nederlanden, which is to say that a banking and insurance group decided the Netherlands needed a free internet provider and built one. Its own FAQ from November 1999 says so in the first line, and its press page three years later still describes it as a wholly owned subsidiary of the ING group.

Free meant a particular thing and the company was careful to define it. You paid no subscription and nothing for your email address. You paid the telephone charges at the local rate, and a one-off five guilder registration fee. The money came back to Freeler through the start page, which it said it would make as attractive as possible through partnerships, and from the large financiers standing behind it. Users who had come across from Postbank's Gironet kept their dial-up number and password and were allowed to keep their old address until 1 January 2001.

It worked immediately and then it worked too well. A Dutch newspaper survey in November 1999 counted the sign-ups across the free providers that had all launched within days of each other in early October, and Freeler had the most: 350,000, against roughly 200,000 for Wish and 150,000 for KPN's own Het Net. The same article noted the obvious caveat, which is that people were registering with several providers at once.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the install CD ~

Most of the complaints that newspaper received about free internet were about Freeler specifically, and they were all the same complaint. The five guilders came off your account straight away and then you waited for the CD-ROM. Freeler had to stagger the software mailing because of the volume of sign-ups, and the average gap between registering and actually getting online ran to four to six weeks. The helpdesk was hard to reach. A spokesman called these teething problems.

The other standing grievance was not Freeler's fault and was the structural flaw in the whole free-internet idea. The Dutch consumer association was getting complaints from new users shocked by their telephone bills, because an hour of surfing cost about three guilders in call charges. Free internet was free of a subscription and of nothing else, and the people a free offer brought online were by definition the people with no prior bill to compare it against.

~ the FreeJays ~

Freeler's portal had a device that dates it precisely. Alongside the directory, the news, the weather, the horoscopes, the share prices and an auction, the start page carried columns by invented user-personas called FreeJays, prototype internet users who wrote about their experiences to help newcomers settle in. The homepage from November 1999 asks visitors directly whether they want to become a FreeJay. Somebody in 1999 looked at a brand new audience of people who had never been online and decided what they needed was fictional neighbors.

Underneath the portal the company gradually stopped doing things itself. The technical platform was contracted out to Energis from 1 August 2001. The portal's news and search were handed to Ilse Media in June 2002, with ING continuing to supply only the financial content, which is why the final working captures of the site still carry promotions for ING group savings products. On 19 March 2004 the free offer ended. Existing free accounts could stay, but only if their owners kept dialing in through Freeler.

~ bedankt voor het vertrouwen ~

KPN signed a letter of intent with ING on 9 December 2004 and the deal was definitive on 18 February 2005. The price has never been published for either side. Freeler had about 145,000 active customers and some sixty staff at that point, and it was going into Planet Media Group, which already held Planet Internet and Het Net and had over 1.3 million customers. One of the companies Freeler had beaten in the sign-up race of 1999 ended up owning it.

The ending is dated by Freeler's own homepage and it is a proper farewell rather than a redirect. By 24 October 2005 the site carried a notice headed "Het Net takes over the service from Freeler", explaining that Freeler had been acquired by KPN earlier that year, that the service would continue under the Het Net name, and that subscribers had already been told about the switch by email and by ordinary post. It closes: Freeler thanks you for your confidence over the past years, with kind regards, the employees of Freeler. The copyright line reads 2000-2005 Freeler b.v.

On 28 October the page was a 490-byte stub reading "Under Construction, In aanbouw, Powered by Planet Internet". The next day it was a redirect to Het Net and it stayed one for years. Het Net was itself retired into KPN later on, so the brand Freeler's customers were moved to did not last a great deal longer than Freeler had.

The address is still half alive, though. freeler.nl has no website and the apex does not resolve, but its mail is handled by KPN's mail servers and the server still answers, which means addresses issued by a free dial-up provider owned by a Dutch bank in 1999 can still receive mail more than two decades after the company that gave them out stopped existing. KPN inherited the obligation along with the customer list, and appears to have kept it.

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