Biography

Education

• Ph.D., Communication, University of Southern California (Annenberg School), 2013
• LL.M., New York University School of Law, 2000
• M.C.J., LL.B., University of Paris (Assas School of Law), 1999, 1998
• Research Associate, Berkeley Law, 1997
• Annenberg-Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute (Oxford University, University of Pennsylvania), 2011
• Research Scholar, Internet History Program, Computer History Museum, 2015-current

Research interests

• Telecommunications networks ecosystems design, law, and policy
• International communication
• Financial technologies
• History of online ecosystems
• Minitel and videotex networks

Recent publications

My first book is now out with MIT Press. Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (with Kevin Driscoll) is an exploration of the technology, culture, and policy that sustained the world’s first mass-scale online system for more than thirty years. As today’s internet is being broken up into an archipelago of walled gardens, Minitel offers a compelling counter-example of a platform that balanced private innovation with the public interest. Minitel was shut down in 2012, but its history of Minitel should continue to inform our thinking about Internet policy, today and into the future.

• Julien Mailland & Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web, IEEE Spectrum, July 2017
• Julien Mailland, “Roman Polanski and the ‘Artists’ Minister’: American Criminal Law v. French Cultural Diplomacy,” Sports and Entertainment Law Journal (Spring 2016)
• Julien Mailland, “101 Online: American Minitel Network and Lessons from its Failure,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, (January – March 2016) (email me if you’d like a copy of the article)

More publications

Recently in the press

• Julien Mailland, Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet, The Atlantic, June 16, 2017
• I recently interviewed Daniel Hannaby, co-founder of famous pink Minitel site “3615 SM”, as part of the Computer History Museum Oral History program.  The 2.5-hour video is here, and the transcript is here.
• Minitel, 1978-2012 // an other network (Lorie Emerson’s blog)
• When France exported Minitel to Californian rave parties (Vincent Glad, Liberation, France)
• Aux Etats-Unis, le “modèle Minitel” surprend toujours (Damien Leloup, Le Monde, France)

Minitel Research Lab, USA

I co-founded the Minitel Research Lab, USA, with Kevin Driscoll.  The mission of the Lab is to create a comprehensive, independent digital Minitel museum and resource center; explore the technical, social, political and legal significance of the Minitel network; and make creative use of the machines to incite critical thinking about network design.  We maintain the world’s largest digital Minitel musem at www.minitel.us.  We tweet from @minitelresearch.  Our work and collections have been featured in Wired, ARS Technica, Fox Business News (U.S.), Le Monde, Libération, NEON (France), and Computer Magazine (Ukraine).