Where the internet lived

People talk about the internet as if it were weather: everywhere, nowhere, in the air. For a few years around 2000 it had a street map, and the map was short.

Twenty-five years later the addresses are still recitable. The companies are giant now, or gone. The streets stayed.

38 rue des Jeûneurs, 75002

Telehouse, 1996. The Sentier: the rag trade, wholesalers, bolts of fabric going up and down the stairs all day. Server racks where there had been clothes racks. This is roughly where French networks first learned to talk to each other, in the back rooms of the garment district. Nobody in the street knew.

15 rue d'Aboukir, 75002

Nerim, a few streets over. Named after a crush, and every server named out of Metroid. A small ISP doing serious work with the private jokes left in.

137 boulevard Voltaire, 75011

Telehouse again, 1999, bigger. If Jeûneurs was where the networks met, Voltaire was where they moved in. A large share of the country's traffic sitting behind an ordinary Haussmann facade you would walk past without a glance. You still would.

62 rue Amelot, 75011

Iliad, in the basement. You found it by following the signs for the unemployment office and turning right at the back of the arcade. Nothing at the entrance carried a company name. A couple of months on the Free payroll bought a few hours down there: hot, loud, lit like a parking garage, cable trays overhead and no daylight anywhere.

68 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008

Claranet, in a basement again. The one good address on the list, a hundred-odd meters down the same street as the Élysée Palace. The visit was for a customer of mine. The bays that turned out to matter sat mid-arm of a U-shaped floor, unremarkable, the kind of row you walk past on the way to your own. I read the name on them and it meant nothing. It was OVH.

There was nothing to notice. No sign that the row was different from the others, no reason to look at it twice. Things that become enormous do not look like anything beforehand.

Five addresses. Two working neighborhoods and a palace. Not one of the buildings was built for this. A wholesaler's back room, a Haussmann block, somebody's basement, an address that had spent a century doing something else entirely. The infrastructure moved into the city the way a tenant does, and the city never noticed.

The thing had a location you could stand in. You could put a hand on the rack that was carrying the traffic. Everything since has been an argument about how far away the machine is allowed to be, and the answer keeps getting further.

The magic had a street number.
Nothing since has had an address.