The Wall Street Journal today reports on France’s efforts to create a competitor to Google. As described in an earlier post, France’s ever-vigilent culture wardens see Google as a threat. Specifically they find galling (pun intended) Google’s initiative to scan millions of books from US and UK libraries into its database. This, says French President Chirac, presents “immense danger” of “cultural standardization.” France has managed to get the EU on its side in fighting the threat, with some $77 million committed to an EU book-scanning project, and $46 million toward other projects, including development of a EuroGoogle. All this despite the fact that Google seems perfectly willing to scan European volumes as part of its own project.
Strangely enough, despite the concerns of the French government, the French themselves seem unperturbed by Google–it has a higher share of the search engine market (66%) in France than it does in America (47%). No doubt French websurfers are busy Googling the address of their nearest McDonald’s.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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