To this day I cannot grasp how France fucked this up : France had 20 years of experience with monetizing an online network before the internet was a thing. And the Minitel was in almost every household. The terminal was free (or very cheap), and in the 90' , from memory , all the people I knew had one at home. Even the less technological-minded people. Ok, the minitel services were overpriced, and it was mostly porn chat-room, fake dating site, ads, and silly low-res game... But the dude making money out of it should have known what would work for the www. They didnt obviously. No google, no fb, no itunes coming from France
I was fascinated to learn about this stuff because it seems really well architected; even a decent realization of the 6th and 7th layers of the OSI network model (which aren't practically used anywhere and are thus terribly re-implemented at the application level...).