Planet Internet

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

~ the goodbye ~

For about ten years there was a kind of company that does not exist any more: the internet provider that also thought it should be your newspaper. You paid it for a dial-up account and it handed you a homepage you had not chosen, filled with news its own staff had written that morning. Planet Internet was the Dutch one, and for a while it did that job better than anybody.

It started in 1995. Michiel Frackers and Frans Straver put it together with money from Dutch publishing and from the national phone company, which is the sort of arrangement that only made sense during the window when nobody was sure whether the internet was a telecom product or a media product. In 1997 it merged with World Access, the provider behind wxs.nl, and by 1999 the combined operation had dropped the other name and was simply Planet Internet. That same year it swallowed Het Net, KPN's own consumer service.

Turkey had the same argument and settled it the other way. My line came from TTNet, which sold access and left the reading to somebody else. The portal habit at home belonged to Mynet, which was a portal and nothing more. The two halves stayed in different companies here, so I have no equivalent memory to offer. Planet is the version where both halves lived in one building, and the building had a newsroom in it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

By the mid 2000s Planet.nl was carrying what the Dutch media trade press described as the largest online news desk in the country and the oldest independent internet editorial department in the Netherlands. That is a strange pair of claims to attach to a company whose actual business was selling modem access, and it held for roughly twelve years. It had staff and it had arguments about the front page, which is ordinary newspaper furniture paid for by an unusual thing: subscriptions to a phone service.

The ownership got tidied along the way. On 1 January 2005 the Planet Media Group was absorbed into KPN Telecom BV and the operation began trading as KPN Internet, though the Planet name stayed on the doors and on something close to 600,000 customer bills. A brand can outlive its own company by years if enough people have it printed on a direct debit.

~ the postmortem ~

The newsroom went first. On 31 December 2007 the editorial department was shut, and Planet.nl spent its last months filled with material from DAG, a joint venture between KPN and the publisher PCM. The site kept the shape of a news portal without the part that had made it one.

KPN announced in June 2008 that it was retiring the Planet name, part of a plan to cut its number of brands roughly in half. Customers started migrating on 1 July and the domain went over to KPNvandaag.nl, a replacement portal with Google search bolted on where the newsroom used to be. The Dutch Wikipedia records the 8th as the last day the old site answered at all, which is the sort of one-week discrepancy you get when a shutdown is really a migration.

~ what got buried with it ~

The access business did not die. Those 600,000 lines are still out there under a different name, still billed monthly, and KPN is a bigger company now than it was then. What died was the idea that the firm selling you the connection had any business telling you what was happening in the world.

That idea lost everywhere and not only in the Netherlands. It lost because search made the default homepage negotiable, and because nobody would pay extra for an ISP's opinion once every newspaper was one address away. Planet had simply committed to it harder than the others, with real reporters on a real budget, which meant it had further to fall when the answer came back.

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