Proximus Skynet

» see skynet.be as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Belgacom, the Belgian state telecom, put its internet business online in 1995 under the name Skynet. The Terminator reference was deliberate and it stayed on the letterhead for twenty-four years, which is a long time to keep a joke about an artificial intelligence that exterminates humanity attached to a phone company. It became a wholly owned Belgacom subsidiary in 1998, and by 2000 skynet.be was one of the first real Belgian portals, in a market where the alternative was reading a French site or a Dutch one.

Portal in the old sense: news on the front, classifieds, weather, a directory, horoscopes, a search box that mostly handed off elsewhere, and everything a person might plausibly want on the way to somewhere else. The company bought its way outward through the 2000s. The Push and the Kidcity education site in 2002, Justforyou in 2003, ADSL.be and the Arena51 gaming site in 2004. In 2005 it started Skynet iMotion Activities to make its own video and picked up rights to the Jupiler League, the Belgian first division, which is the point where an ISP portal starts behaving like a broadcaster.

The reason people actually turned up was smaller and sat underneath all of it. Every Belgacom customer got a free email address ending in skynet.be, and to read it you logged in through the portal, so the country's largest ISP was funnelling its entire subscriber base past the front page several times a day for two decades. That is the whole engine. It also explains what happened when webmail stopped needing a portal wrapped around it.

Belgacom renamed itself Proximus in 2015 and left Skynet alone for four more years. Then on 1 July 2019 skynet.be was folded into proximuspickx.be, a combined television and browsing product, and the address became a redirect. The mail survived: an @skynet.be account still opens today through Proximus Webmail, which is the one part of the arrangement customers would have gone to war over.

~ the case file ~

~ the mailbox trick ~

Every incumbent telecom in Europe ran this play and most of them ran it into the ground. Give away the address, then put the login behind a homepage you can sell advertising on. Wanadoo did it in France and T-Online did it in Germany. In Turkey I got the TTNet version, where the ISP's own page was the default homepage on any machine you had not configured yourself, and you cleared it off the way you clear off a preinstalled toolbar.

The trick worked exactly as long as email was the only reason to log in anywhere. Once Gmail arrived and people started keeping an address that was not tied to their phone bill, the ISP portal lost its captive traffic and became a normal website competing with normal websites, which none of them were built to be.

~ the buying years ~

Skynet's acquisition list reads like an inventory of things Belgians did online in the mid-2000s: a search-marketing firm, a kids' education site, a gaming community, an ADSL comparison site, a football rights package. The strategy was that a portal should own a piece of every category rather than be good at one, and it is the same strategy Lycos and Terra and Tiscali were running at the same time with the same result.

~ 1 july 2019 ~

VRT filed on it on 13 June 2019, a couple of weeks ahead of the switch, in a piece about Belgian websites that had already disappeared. The reasoning Proximus gave was the plain one and probably the true one: sites are specialized now, and people go to a news site for news and a recipe site for recipes instead of to a place that offers both badly. Skynet was a 1995 answer to a 1995 problem, which was that nobody knew where anything was.

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