> This meant that even the poorest of households contained a set, subsidised by the taxpayer.
It was a freemium model, France Telecom was making a lot of money and was able to fund the Minitel without tax payer money. In fact, France Telecom was a cash cow for the government, not a single time took France Telecom money from the tax payers.
Also, my grand parents were able to use it, basically everybody could use it, the Internet took off extremely well in France across all the generations because it was possible to say: "this is like the Minitel, just type here the address, and there you go".
I did introduction courses to learn how to use Internet in the late 90's and for the 100's of people I helped, the Minitel analogy was perfect and allowed us to move forward extremely fast.
Edit: Thinking about it, this is the same model as the app store. To sell on the app store, you need to ask Apple first. You had to ask France Telecom at that time.