Let’s go back ten years. The world of the internet was just beginning to emerge. In computing rooms in universities all over the world young people were discovering new tools of communication. With all the enthusiasm of radio hams, they sat over their morning coffees and talked about the latest text messages to have arrived on their terminals. They swapped notes on new skills as varied as how to transmit texts via electronic staging posts that were scattered across four continents and where to find an on-line version of Moby Dick.

Open computer networks were growing, and nobody had any doubt that this was a first step towards the utopia imagined by H.G. Wells —a world brain". People were prophesying the imminent fall of the last empire —the concentrated power of the state and big business. The vice- president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Perry Barlow, threw down a challenge : "Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here".

In this world, text is king. Each of the network’s public protocols is defined by text : a simple, bare description under the modest heading "request for comments", plus the computer code that makes it all work. The protocols themselves consist of a series of commands, written in a language that is accessible.

The networking machines have a dual role as intermediaries. As intercommunicating media they "speak" to each other and make exchanges of information possible. They also act as a helping hand, in the sense of offering an interface capable of leading the user through the intricacies of their digital commands. As hacker and novelist Neal Stephenson explains in an interesting essay about operating systems : "So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to convert the information you’re working with —be it images, e- mail messages, movies, or word processing documents— into the necklaces of bytes that are the only things computers know how to work with".

The interface offers more flexibility than the old protocols, which are concise but rigid. It makes things simpler because it is now no longer necessary to type in "command lines". Having set human beings free from more traditional (and time- consuming) means of communication, the programmers set themselves the task of overcoming the cumbersome nature of the tools they had just created. In the process, the interface introduces a separation between the network and the user, a distance which eventually renders the code invisible.

By 1993 personal computers had been transformed by the addition of graphics, and the internet went "multimedia". The Web exploded, thanks to Mosaic, a browser which had a graphic interface —a mixture of images and text. The world of big business was intrigued, and began making its first tentative steps into the world of the Net. It was a culture shock. The early ventures into the world of dot.com were so hesitant that John Perry Barlow publicly castigated the big media firms for "merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic".

But six years later the Titanic was sailing again. The old empire even seemed to have been successful in colonising the new continent. Arnaud Lagardère, heir to France’s biggest arms manufacturer, based his TV adverts on the film Fahrenheit 451 by François Truffaut (in which the censors decree the burning of books) : the implication was that, thanks to the internet services provided by his company, freedom of expression would flourish, freed from the flames of censorship. Something rather distasteful here : several months later, when Lagardère sold his internet subsidiary to Deutsche Telekom, he valued each of his 300,000 subscribers at 9,000 euros a head. At rates like that, there should be a way to make money from them one day.

So the question now becomes : how best to capture the internet consumer. Netbox, the company that produces an internet terminal that plugs into your TV, thinks that it has found the answer : "With Netbox you have access to every home that has a TV. Sign up all your clients now and become their preferred server. Are you going to miss out on the second e-commerce revolution ?" The key to electronic commerce is who controls the point of access. Once the initial opening was created, the interface soon became a way of rescuing the old empire from oblivion and regaining control, by transforming surfers into consumers.

On a visit to Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, Neal Stephenson was struck by the sight of a man with a camcorder. It was one of the "new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel colour screen about the size of a playing card ... Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television." In Stephenson’s view, it is precisely this demand for an easy, controlled, surprise-free environment that accounts for the power of the interface. The graphic interface functions in the same way as the images that are created in "Disney’s worlds" : the company takes classic texts and cuts them down into bite-sized paraphrased versions. The interface similarly avoids the need for the user to spend time on the text (culture) underlying the workings of the computer or network. In so doing, it "infantilises" its users —they abandon their autonomy to it, despite the apparent sense of power that they may experience.

The most popular browsers are built around promoting consumer behaviour. One highly emblematic moment of this is the appearance on your screen of a "secure financial transaction" symbol. An icon flashes up, in the form of a key or a padlock, to indicate that you need have no worries about sending your credit card details. On the other hand, when you connect to a site that is about to place a cookie" on your computer, the browsers display nothing. Would it not be reasonable to use a similar icon to warn of the risk of theft of data and loss of privacy represented by the use of cookies ? Could the software providers not have placed a discreet little icon next to the keys and the padlocks, to indicate the presence of cookies ?

Another issue of concern to the "new media" companies is how to dictate the start page to which browser programs direct themselves when they have finished loading. Of course, we all have the option of rejecting the pre-loaded start page provided by our browsers and finding something more suitable. But most people don’t. This is proved by the fact that the most regularly accessed home page in France is the one belonging to the country’s number one internet service provider. This is followed by the home page of a free e-mail site, then a stock exchange site, and then... the home page of the country’s second largest provider.

The massive arrival of a new public on-line is transforming the Net. Thousands of CD-Roms are handed out to the public every day, with the service providers exhorting you to "Sign up for easy-access internet !" and the entertainment companies offering "No-hassle access to culture !" Since most of the public know no different, the dominant image that users receive of the internet and its ways is the pre-packaged image offered by the service providers

The possibility of controlling people’s personal computers remains imperfect, since it is grafted onto a culture which tends to resist pigeonholing. Imposing their own vision of computer culture will not be easy for the consumer companies. But the public-access internet terminals now to be found in most cities offer an access that is inseparable from advertising and e-commerce. Access to the internet via mobile phones will operate via choices made by the service providers : "When the new subscriber comes out of the shop with his mobile phone, he is immediately confronted by the sites chosen [by his service provider] and is encouraged to buy their products, and not those of others".

The internet is going through a phase of confrontation between the public’s demand for autonomy and the companies’ desire to control their customers. In order to make the elements of this control more palatable, they are dressed up as "content". As Guy Debord puts it in The Society of the Spectacle : "The spectacle is a permanent opium war waged to make it impossible to distinguish goods from commodities."