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But like the beetle, minitel is in danger of becoming outmoded. With monthly Minitel fees rising just as PC prices are starting to plummet, some users are turning to multimedia vehicles that can connect them with the Internet, or to more varied commercial services. France Telecom is struggling mightily to keep its Minitel lead, partly by forming strategic alliances with foreign communications groups (including AT&T, Sony, Motorola and Apple), but the French effort, like others in Europe, is burdened by the weight of the European Union's burgeoning bureaucracy, which is increasingly inserting barriers across the Continent's communications throughways.
Europeans recognize that a race is on and that the Americans are winning. At the E.U.'s Corfu summit in June, leaders issued a report warning of encroachments from the outside -- i.e., America -- and admonishing, ``We have to get it right, and get it right now.'' So far, there is nothing in Europe or Asia to compare with the American commercial services such as CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy. The most aggressive of them, CompuServe, has set up local -- and low-price -- nodes in most of Europe's major cities, offering forums and services in German, French and Dutch. The service is adding new subscribers in German-speaking countries at a rate of 1,500 a week -- small by U.S. standards, but significant in a Europe with only a third of America's PC penetration. Government controls and low consumer consciousness, however, remain bigger problems than access. Most CD-ROM drives are made in Asia, for example, yet two-thirds of installed CD-ROM units are in America. Japan, a nation of superb hardware innovators, is ranked only 18th in the world in terms of PCs -- largely because there is not much to connect with in Japan. Japan is also far behind the U.S. in hooking computers together in networks, although that business started to take off in 1994 as fledgling on-line services like Niftyserve, as well as limited access to Internet, enjoyed a huge surge in customers. Japan's maruchimedia may be the hot topic at electronics-industry gatherings, but the Japanese seem bewildered about what it is.
``They want to be in the multimedia business,'' says Roger Mathus, executive director of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association in Japan. ``But they don't know how to do it. They thrive on having a model they can improve upon, but they don't have one yet.''
Instead the Japanese bureaucracy is marshaling its forces for a ``multimedia war'' -- with all the implications of official encouragement that the phrase suggests. The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications' (M.P.T.) gargantuan plan to run fiber-optic cable into almost every home by 2010 will cost between $330 billion and $500 billion. Critics warn that it is not only an expensive but probably also an unnecessary weapon, since there are no services -- current or expected soon -- that would actually employ fiber to the home. A hybrid system of coaxial cable and fiber-optic cable does the job just as well for a fraction of the cost.