COLUMN ONE : Minitel: Miracle or Monster? : Erotic message services have become the dirty little secret of France’s videotext network. Critics say the government may be profiting from crime.

PARIS —  When the French phone company launched its futuristic “Minitel” system here a few years ago, it turned this Old World country into a nation of button-pushing Jetsons.

Almost overnight, millions of French citizens had access to a simple little video display terminal distributed free by the government-owned utility, France Telecom. Like George and Jane Jetson in the Space Age American cartoon series, they could push a few buttons to order groceries, buy opera tickets, write electronic letters to their friends, transfer money in their bank accounts and book their Concorde tickets--all in the comfort of their own homes.

Today there are more than 8,000 services offered on the Minitel, ranging from a 25-million-entry electronic “phone book” that extends all the way to the French Caribbean islands, to horoscopes and pari-mutuel betting.

With more than 5 million terminals distributed around France and its territories, the Minitel videotext system is by far the biggest and most successful network of telephone-linked home computers in the world. France Telecom proudly boasts that it makes a respectable profit by charging service providers and users for their time on the screen, more than 60 million hours last year.

But there may be a dark side to the “Minitel miracle.” The Court of Accounts, an elite budgetary watchdog agency that answers directly to the French president, warned that one of the biggest money-makers in the Minitel system, the so-called “Pink Minitel” network of erotic and other message services, has made the government a potential unwitting accomplice in criminal acts from which it profits.

“The administration should be careful,” the agency stated in its report June 21, “that it does not find itself in a situation of complicity, by furnishing the means for activities that might be declared illegal by a criminal judge, for which the Minitel network forms the base.”

The Minitel system offers dozens of notorious “pink” services. They usually employ a woman’s name or baldly suggestive titles such as “Brutal Beach,” “Perver” and “Cruella.” Advertised on lurid posters and billboards all over France, the services offer a whole menu of options for the user, ranging from explicit sexual graphics to direct dialogue with another person.

As a result, the phone company finds itself in uncharted legal territory, directly--and profitably--plugged into a high-tech enterprise that has created a new genre of difficult-to-detect, mostly sexually linked crimes.

That element of criminality is what differentiates this controversy from an otherwise similar one in the United States over sex-related services available via 976 telephone numbers. There, as in France, the telephone company has argued that it merely provides the medium and should not be put in the position of a censor on content.

In protest against the increasing influence of the pink services, Francois de Valence, publisher of several French Minitel-related trade magazines, began refusing them advertising in his publications in 1986.

“The whole electronic communications world was being corrupted by these porno services,” he told a reporter from the newspaper Le Monde at the time. “When it all started, we used to describe porno messages as the warts of the system. Then we realized they had developed into a plague.”

The “plague” however, is immensely profitable, both for operators of the services and the government, through the phone company. De Valence estimates that the most successful of the Pink Minitel services boasts revenues of about $400,000 a month and that as much as half of France Telecom’s Minitel profits comes from the so-called messageries of the Pink Minitel, which include video games and the horoscope and other entertainment features.

However, the watchdog court’s report also predicted that by 1995 the Minitel system will have an anticipated deficit of 8 billion French francs--about $1.3 billion. The government thus faces the prospect of worsening its utility’s financial prospects if it moves to curtail the system’s criminal potential.

When the government first launched Minitel in the early ‘80s, officials argued that the cost of supplying free terminals to customers would be covered by savings in paper and printing costs for the annual phone directories. If a person opted for a Minitel with its “electronic phone book,” the phone company did not give then a directory, except for the yellow pages listings of businesses.

However, as the court’s report noted severely, the savings were much less than anticipated, not even 10% the cost of the terminals. As a result, the phone company found itself more dependent on its services, particularly the Pink Minitel, than it had anticipated.

“No one dreamed that the ‘pink’ services would form such a large base of the Minitel income,” said De Valence. Even worse, he said, no one anticipated that the innovative new system might be connected to crime.

Because of that link to crime and the sex-oriented “pink” services, the phone company finds itself the target of a lawsuit filed by two large family organizations over the Pink Minitel. The Federation of French Families (FFF) and the National Confederation of Catholic Family Assns. (CNAFC) contend that the Minitel message services in which anonymous video “conversations” take place between callers are mainly prostitution networks that often involve children.

The complaint lists a series of serious crimes, ranging from child prostitution to murder, that have been linked to the system.

In one celebrated case in Paris, for example, a 24-year-old call girl, Anne Trinh, was tortured and killed by a sadomasochist who made contact with her through one of the Pink Minitel message services.

The Trinh murder was detailed in a recent book entitled “The Black File on the Pink Minitel” by journalist Denis Perier. Ironically, the author notes, the Trinh case was also solved in part through the use of a Minitel. Using the sophisticated Minitel electronic telephone directory, a friend of the dead woman was able to locate Trinh’s dentist, enabling police to identify her severely burned body.

Other Minitel crimes listed in the lawsuit included robbery rings, extortion plots and the case of a 40-year-old man in Bordeaux who was using a Minitel service to “lease” the 6-year-old son of his common-law wife for sexual purposes.

Because of its huge potential audience and the anonymity provided by the government, the Minitel is relatively safe and effective criminal tool. And as with the introduction of the telephone more than a century ago, criminals have been among the first to exploit it.

In 1988, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit claim, there were at least 20 documented cases of serious crimes traced to the Minitel.

Jean-Edouard Bloch, attorney for the family groups in the lawsuit, said:

“What we have shown is that, effectively, this new technology of communication can be used under the protection of anonymity for pederasts, sadomasochists, prostitutes and, why not, drug dealing.”

Bloch describes the antiquated law surrounding Minitel crimes as a “judicial void.”

“We are not struggling against pornography in this case,” he said, “we just wish the state were not so active in this pursuit, not so directly linked in this activity.”

The family organizations’ complaint is being considered by investigative magistrate Andree Gervais de Lafond, who like an American district attorney, has the power to direct a police investigation into the charges if she chooses. Possibilities include the use of taps on the Minitel lines to monitor electronic conversations for criminal content.

However, an earlier lawsuit against five principal Pink Minitel operators was thrown out by another court, after the judges ruled that a centuries-old law applying to literature “that incites the corruption of morals” could not be invoked against the Minitel moguls, particularly since it had not been enforced for decades against writers.

Although money problems and the criminal legal issues surrounding the Pink Minitel put a damper on one of the government’s proudest projects, they will not, in all probability, put the popular Minitel out of business. The system has found enthusiastic supporters among a wide range of business and individual subscribers.

Minitel users who have mastered the art of making train reservations on the Minitel screen will not happily return to the ancient system of foul-tempered ticket vendors in the stations. Families use the Minitel to communicate with their loved ones in prison. Labor unions use it to call strikes and announce demonstrations. Chess champion Gary Kasparov once used it to take on 2,000 challengers at the same time. One large department store receives more than 25% of its orders on the Minitel.

New services are discovered every day. An American rental car company, for example, recently began using the Minitel to keep track of its fleet of cars. Americans living in Paris can use it to call up the latest baseball scores through a link with the USA Today newspaper.

More likely, the complaints and the watchdog court’s warning will lead to restructuring of the system, including a probable end to free distribution of the Minitel terminals.

At the conclusion of its report, the watchdog court recommended that new legislation be drafted governing the Minitel. The agency argued that free distribution of Minitels, which is the secret to the rapid growth of the system and its services, has created an “artificial demand.”

Accordingly, France Telecom is expected to begin charging monthly rates for new Minitel units sometime next year. It is not certain whether the monthly charges would be applied to the 5 million terminals already distributed “free.” If the existing terminals are included in the monthly charge system, experts predict, it could drastically reduce the number of terminals in circulation and the use of various services. A poll conducted by one of De Valence’s magazines indicated that 40% of Minitel owners would return their terminals rather than pay even a minimum fee.

The touchiest question remains what to do about the Pink Minitel, involving as it does questions of state-enforced morality and censorship.

When the controversy about illegal activities on the system first appeared, France Telecom attempted to distance itself.

Claire Mialaret, a former judge who is now legal adviser to the utility, explained: “The difficulty,” she said in a recent interview, “is that we consider ourselves the carrier. We don’t want to be considered as a censor. As a public service, we don’t want to be in the position of dictating morality.”

But after the many complaints about abuses, France Telecom drew up a new contract in 1987 that requires all Minitel service operators to identify themselves by name and address on their programs. In addition, a 40-member advisory commission, headed by a senior government official, was created to hear complaints about the system’s operation.

So far, according to Mialaret, the commission has not acted to remove a single one of the more than 4,000 services on the Pink Minitel circuit, not all of which are controversial.

Nor is the new contract vigorously enforced. From her office Minitel terminal, Mialaret called up the widely advertised service “Perver”--despite the new contract requirements, there was no name, no address and no identification of the person operating the service.

“This is one of the ones we would like to get rid of,” Mialaret said resignedly.

Critics like author Perier contend that the government is not serious about enforcement because it cannot afford to cut off the profitable Minitel sex services. They produce $100 million in revenue for the state, more than any other sector, he says. Without the Pink Minitel, he said, the financial picture of the entire Minitel system would not be nearly so rosy.