chris@creanet.net (by way of Pit Schultz ) on Mon, 5 May 1997 08:50:27 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> France is jumping in the techno-liberal-bandwagon |
[should i tell you how happy i am about this an historical moment for nettime? lets all embrace the first mail from France, the proud and mysterious nation which seems to resist the internet for so long! read all about it now. -p] How France is jumping in the techno-liberal-bandwagon Three months ago, France was considered to be the most computer-illiterate country in Europe. From the media point of view. Of course one should not ignore that France has a very strong background in military secrets and a lot of its sensible computers are highly protected and not accessible through the Net. That is one of the reasons why Internet has had difficulties to grow here, the other one beeing the protected confortable revenues of Minitel. So, about three months ago, our president was inaugurating the new Mitterand Library, and radio and TV journalists were able to hear him asking a lady who was demoing a multimedia application : what is... a mouse ?". Everybody was flabbergasted : our president is a computer illiterate ! But a week later, he was welcoming Bill Gates (as a chef d'etat) and immediately after he was talking on TV about how France was going to network all of the schools and universities within the end of his mandate. There is just a slight problem : french schools are under-equipped since the failure of 1980ies Plan Informatique, and no budget-plan was announced. Even worth, the "new" government's policy (if they are to be elected again) is a drastic downsizing of public expenses, so one can wonder who is going to pay. Some other interesting bits of information : France has recently refused to contribute to the construction of the new European backbone. Experiments on Internet access through cable is obviously slowed down by France Telecom (who owns the main cables in big cities). Access to the few available public education websites is restricted to MS Explorer or Netscape 3.0. And two weeks ago, 6000 web sites hosted for free by Mygale (a non-profit server based in University of Saint Denis (north of Paris) have been shut down on the pretext they were eating too much of the bandwith of Renater (the french University and Research bone). This rude black out means there are no plans for any "public space" or "public service", in other words the whole Internet activity is left to commercial providers, the biggest one beeing France Telecom. It also means that despite an over-protective francophone attitude, there is no intent to pay for its costs. Everybody knows that France is also one of the three countries in the world to purely forbid encryption. France has already voted for key-escrow systems, and is trying hard to push forward these control-systems at EEC. France also committed a report (the Beaussant Report) proposing the creation of an "independent" committee responsible for the "decency" of Internet contents. Which means that this committee, an equivalent of the Audiovisual High Autority, will statuate on the political-correctness of Net contents, thus considering Internet as a mass media and applying it the same laws and rules as other mass medias. Since the "mouse-story", and specially since they started the election campaign, one can listen french right politicians claiming that France has to jump in modernity, and bless the liberal techno-future which is going to bring her the solutions to her problems. Unemployment is a problem, you can find a job on Internet. French people don't consume enough, they will on Internet. There is a lack of dynamic start-up companies, they will blossom on Internet, where everybody knows there is plenty of companies making money. Etc, etc. Three days ago Le Monde mentionned another report planning to offer a Net access to every french citizen, hundreds of public access terminals animated by the newly multimedia educated soldiers of our brand new (still in the limbs) professionnal Army, and taxes reduction for multimedia companies. Again the fundings are all but explicits. What is clear anyway is that France apparently decided to jump in the techno-liberal-bandwagon. Unless it is mere electoral propaganda, which I don't believe. After beeing considered as a neolitic country, she is now entering the Net as a proud newbie who has just read "Internet for Dummies", but has empty pockets and no boarding ticket. Flame on her ! [more soon!] --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de