JuniorNet

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

~ the eulogy ~

JuniorNet was founded in Boston in 1996 by Alan Rothenberg, who had already built KinderActive, and it launched to the public in March 1999. The product was a subscription at $9.95 a month, and what you got was a closed set of places a child was allowed to go. Content came through JuniorNet's own client software, part of it shipped on CD-ROM and part pulled down over the modem, along with email and bulletin boards that a human had read before anyone else did.

The licensing was the impressive part. Highlights and Ranger Rick were inside, Sports Illustrated for Kids material was inside, and Reading Rainbow signed on as a premier partner with LeVar Burton as the company's public face. PBS stations were given a small slice of equity in exchange for promoting it, which put the pitch in front of exactly the households that would pay ten dollars a month for a safer internet. RCN Corporation put in $47 million for 47.5 percent in April 1999, and three venture firms added $23 million on top.

By 2000 the thing being sold was getting harder to sell. Free children's sites were multiplying, they were paid for by advertising rather than by parents, and the browser those sites ran in was already installed. A service that required its own software and its own monthly fee was competing against something with a price of zero and no installation. The collapse of dot-com funding removed the option of losing money for a few more years while the market caught up.

In 2001 JuniorNet ceased operations. There was no bankruptcy filing in the usual sense: the secured creditors foreclosed, and the assets went to a new entity called J2 Interactive in which RCN held 23.5 percent. RCN took back full ownership of Lancit, which became RCN Entertainment, and in 2004 sold the catalogue on to On Screen Entertainment. The same year Encore put the games on a shop shelf as Elementary Advantage 2004: JuniorNet Greatest Hits Vol. I.

~ the dossier ~

~ the walled garden ~

Everything about the design assumed the open internet was the hazard and the subscription was the fence. That was a defensible read in 1999, when filtering software was crude and a search for almost any innocent word could return something a parent would rather explain later. JuniorNet's answer was to skip filtering entirely and only ever show a child things it had licensed.

The flaw shows up the moment you look at the competition. Free kids portals were also curated, also full of licensed characters, and cost nothing because advertisers were paying for the attention instead. Parents were being asked for money to avoid advertising, in a decade when nobody had yet learned to be afraid of advertising.

~ american children, american dollars ~

This one sat two ways away from me. I was fifteen when it launched, which is four or five years past the audience, and I was in Turkey, where a recurring dollar charge on a card was not how households bought anything in 1999. My route to the internet that year was a modem and whatever was reachable for free, the exact opposite of a subscription that promised to keep most of the internet out.

~ what happened to the pieces ~

The content survived the company. Games written for a subscription service ended up on a retail CD in 2004, and copies of the JuniorNet client discs sit on the Internet Archive today, still installable by anyone curious enough to run a 1999 Windows binary.

The domain took the long route. juniornet.com kept serving something until around the middle of 2010 and the registration lapsed on 19 March 2014, thirteen years after the service it named had stopped. It answers today with a page of 114 bytes, which is a polite way of answering nothing at all.

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