French created Internet and used it before all on a planet. What ruined their project?

When inhabitants of the USSR only learned about existence of the World wide web, French already enjoyed that now it is accepted to call Internet. Million people over all country could make purchases online, file documents to higher education institutions and even to correspond in erotic chats directly on a workplace. They used own analog of a network under the name Minitel — the computer terminals connected to the telephone line. At popularity peak which fell on the end of the 90th, the audience of Minitel totaled more than 25 million users, however up to now the system did not live, without having sustained...