Oreka

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

~ the obituary ~

David Bitton registered Oreka in January 2000 and put the service in front of the public that May, in the loudest year of the French free-access fight. The headline number was zero francs for eighteen hours of connection a month with the telephone call included, and the included call is the part that mattered. In 2000 the call was the expensive half of being online, so an offer that swallowed it was an offer that cost its seller real money every hour you stayed connected.

Oreka did not own a network. It bought capacity wholesale and sold access retail, which is a business that works only while the gap between those two prices stays open. Everything the company did for the next five years was an attempt to keep that gap open, and the advertising model was the first attempt.

The free tier lasted months rather than years, and getting onto it meant a waiting list that could hold you for most of one, with four free hours a month while you waited. In early December 2000 the allowance dropped to six hours and the queue disappeared, and during 2001 the free package stopped altogether. By December 2002 Oreka was selling fifty hours a month for 14.50 euros with calls included, which is a perfectly reasonable dial-up subscription and nothing anybody writes about.

~ the case file ~

~ the banner that watched the mouse ~

To use the free hours you had to install Oreka's own Windows dialer rather than the one Microsoft gave you. It opened a strip of advertising above the browser window and it kept checking that a person was present by watching the mouse pointer. Leave the machine and the software noticed. The thinking is easy enough to follow: an advertiser pays for eyes, and nobody could prove the eyes were there, so the mouse stood in for them.

It took very little time for someone to write a program that jiggled the pointer on its own. Twenty-six years later the French accounts of this company still put the hack right next to the offer, and between the two it is the workaround that has kept its detail.

~ what free meant from here ~

Eighteen hours with the call included is an offer that can only exist where somebody other than the phone company gets to price a minute. That was not the situation I was dialing from in 2000. The line billed by the minute regardless of which number the modem reached, Türk Telekom faced nobody who could force it to stop, and so the thing French subscribers spent two years arguing about, who should be paying for the call, was not an open question here at all.

My version of the same decision was arithmetic done before connecting. How long a download would take at 33.6k, and whether to wait until after ten at night when the calls got cheaper.

~ the last word ~

The Firstream group bought Oreka in 2002 and kept it trading for another three years. By the start of 2005 it had stopped taking new subscribers, and on 31 May the service ended for good, with an email to the people still on it. 01net ran the closure under a headline calling Oreka the emblem of free internet, which it was for about eight months in 2000 and never again after that.

The quote the director left behind is the whole industry in two sentences. Faced with the competitive situation and the aggressive pricing of the main operators, he said, he had come to think and to observe that there was no longer any room for ISPs that do not own their network infrastructure. Every French provider that survived the decade owned copper or fiber. The ones that only owned a brand and a dialer went out in a line like that one.

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