T-Online: Walls in the Inbox

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a backstory few people remember anymore. In the eighties, the former Bundespost ran a service called Bildschirmtext — BTX. A closed system, proprietary pages, proprietary tariffs, proprietary censorship. Anyone who wanted to participate had to go through the Deutsche Bundespost. Anyone who didn’t want to go through the Deutsche Bundespost stayed out. The Internet buried that service later. With the Internet came open exchange, standardized, decentralized, without gatekeepers. Telekom — successor to the Bundespost — formally accepted that. In practice, however, it never quite forgot the BTX model.

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T-Online: Walls in the Inbox