STAR-BEACH

~ the obituary ~

Japanese phones in 1999 could already browse. Mine could not. The keitai internet ran on i-mode and EZweb, closed carrier stacks with their own markup and their own billing, and it produced an entire web that never touched a desktop browser and never left the country. STAR-BEACH lived in that web from beginning to end. I can read about it. I cannot remember it.

It opened in december 1999 under the name Friends!, run by a company that eventually took the site's own name. The function was narrow and never widened. You wrote a post saying who you were and what you felt like talking about, other people mailed you, and that was the whole product. Free at every point, with nothing to install, because there was nothing you could install on a handset of that generation.

Around the boards were the other rooms: a games board, a school-reunion search for tracking down old classmates, swap boards for ringtones and for wallpapers, and a board for Johnny's fans. That last one dates the site precisely. Word filters ran on posts, so a banned term meant your message never appeared, and the operators deleted by hand on top of that. Everyone called it sutabi.

The traffic is the reason this is a grave rather than a footnote. Twelve million accesses a day. Four hundred and fifty million a month. All of it on phones, inside one country, on a site that charged nobody anything.

~ the case file ~

~ what the law did ~

Japan regulates the business of introducing people to each other online under a law written in 2003 to keep minors out of it. The 2008 amendment, in force from 1 february 2009, tightened both ends: operators had to register with the authorities, and they had to verify that a user was an adult rather than take their word for it.

Verification in practice meant a credit card check or a carrier age flag. Both of those turn a free service into a gated one and cut off precisely the users the law had been written about. Friends! stopped on the day the amendment took effect. The company did not fight it and did not attempt a compliant version.

~ what got buried with it ~

What went with STAR-BEACH is a shape of internet the smartphone era has no slot for. It was anonymous text at national scale, running inside a walled garden on handsets with numeric keypads, and it reached numbers that would still be respectable today. There is a small industry of Japanese pages now explaining to younger readers what sutabi was, which is what happens when something enormous leaves almost no artifact behind.

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