It seems that way to me. There are about 1% of French people who have
Internet access, and that includes studens and researchers. The latest
figures I saw for private paying subscribers, to online services, or
ISPs, comes to about 40,000. (That makes me avant garde!!!)
The Minitel is very advantageous for content providers: when you pay,
say, 2.23 FF per minute (the price goes from about .34FF/min to
8.64FF/min, with the majority of services around 2FF), half of this money
goes the the phone company, and half to the content provider. You can
calculte how much can be made from the minitel, and see why the content
providers are not interested in the Internet.
The Net does not really appeal to the French, since they are always told
that they need English to use it. Although there are some excellent
sites in French (like FCer Christian Perrot's Nirvanet
http://www.nirvanet.fr , which is in French, English, and Spanish), and
there are more and more, especially from Canada.
Kirk
Kirk McElhearn
Translations from French to English, English to French
Traductions francais-anglais, anglais-francais
kirk@lenet.fr http://www.nirvanet.fr/kirk/kirk.html
91 rue de la Mesangerie
37540 St Cyr sur Loire
France