Postal services and telecommunications have long played an essential role in Lebanon , a small country with an expansive diaspora, a vivid media landscape, and an economy geared toward trade and banking. The sector's history has nonetheless been chaotic, marked by conflict but also, and perhaps most importantly, a deeply rooted legacy of state control, weak competition, and intense politicization.
A combination of poor services and high prices culminated in popular protests against the government's attempt, in October , to tax the widely used messaging service WhatsApp. The anger this measure triggered captured a more general sense of dissatisfaction, [ 1 ] and contributed to tipping the country into a protracted crisis.
Civil unrest coincided with Lebanon's default on its ballooning debt; in the ensuing economic collapse, telecommunications have been among the infrastructure most affected. France first established a post office or "bureau de recette" in the port of Beirut in November It would use French stamps and was designed primarily to facilitate French trade absent an effective Ottoman postal service.
Its overland postal services were notoriously slow and unreliable; moreover, the Ottoman Empire lacked any steamship capacity in the Mediterranean, and was thus incapable of effectively connecting coastal cities in its own empire, not to mention beyond.
By contrast, French postal services could rely on the private shipping company Paquebots de la Mediterrannee, which ran a steamship line between Marseille, Alexandria, and Beirut three times a month. The latter changed names on various occasions over the years, but retains a presence in Lebanon to this day: What was known as of as the Compagnie des Messageries Imperiales [ 5 ] was renamed in Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, which ultimately would become, in , part of CMA-CGM , which is still the main shipping operator in the port of Beirut.
