germany.net

» see germany.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

germany.net was an online service that charged nothing for access. Michaela Merz and Stephan Hess founded it in Frankfurt am Main in 1994, and the logo carried the offer in two words, "online kostenlos", with "ich bin dabei!" handwritten underneath. A user dialed the nearest of up to 30 regional access points and paid the phone company for the call. Nothing went to germany.net.

That was unusual for the time. T-Online and AOL both billed by the minute on top of the phone charges, and the few flat rates on the market cost around 30 marks a month. Like AOL, germany.net handed out a dialer on CD for beginners. Anyone comfortable with the dial-up networking built into Windows 95 could skip the CD, and there was support for Mac OS and Linux too.

The price was paid in reach. All traffic went through a proxy that inserted advertising pages now and then, and the free tier stopped at the border of the German web. Telnet and IRC did not work. International sites needed a premium plan billed by volume, and IRC through a SOCKS proxy was later sold as a paid extra. German Wikipedia's judgment is that it never amounted to full internet access.

RWE came in as an investor, then Deutsche Bank. In 1998 the service was taken over completely by o.tel.o, the telecom venture of RWE and VEBA, and by 1999 it counted more than 500,000 participants. On 1 April 1999 o.tel.o was sold to Mannesmann Arcor for 2.25 billion marks, and germany.net went along with 600,000 customers. Michaela Merz left the same year, the last of the founders to go.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ adbreaks ~

On dial-up in Turkey in 1998 you paid twice, once to the ISP for the account and once to the phone company for the minutes. germany.net's business was deleting the first payment and selling the user's attention to cover it. The ad pages had an in-house name, Adbreaks, and they interrupted a session the way a commercial interrupts a film.

American services tried the same trade a few years later. NetZero gave away dial-up behind a banner window, and BlueLight did it with Kmart's name on the CD. germany.net had been at it since 1994, in a country where the local call itself was metered, so free access there never meant free evenings online.

~ the small change purse ~

Some of what germany.net built early looked ordinary ten years later. Deutsche Bahn's timetables went online for the first time through it. The Kleingeldbörse, a small change purse, let members pay for bits of information and services from 1995, long before anybody said micropayment. The purse outlived everything else here: it existed until March 2017 and was closed only after the balances had been paid out.

~ three brands, one wheel ~

After the purchase Arcor had three consumer online brands where it wanted one. On 4 December 2000 it launched Nexgo, short for Next Generation Online, and moved the customers of germany.net and o.tel.o onto it beside its own. The portal was built around PIA, a personal internet assistant drawn as a control wheel, with webmail that could also send SMS and fax. Dial-up through Nexgo cost 2.9 pfennig a minute by day and 1.9 off-peak, so the free model was gone. Wayback captures have germany.net serving its own pages on 9 November 2000 and forwarding to nexgo.de by 24 February 2001.

Nexgo lasted eleven months. From November 2001 the portal was arcor.de, and the subsidiary still registered as callisto germany.net GmbH became Arcor Online GmbH, which took the name off the last place it was written. The PIA wheel stayed in Arcor's navigation until the end of 2007. Addresses ending in @germanynet.de still deliver today through Vodafone, Arcor's eventual owner.

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