Asterix Alone Against America

In France, too, more than 90 percent of all search queries are conducted via Google, and newspapers owe 40 percent of their traffic to the search engine. Sarkozy had already threatened to impose a «Google tax.» In response, the U.S. company invested 100 million in a new corporate headquarters in Paris. But the skirmish quickly escalated again. The (French) company Free—one of the largest Internet service providers, which had undermined the monopolistic mobile phone rate structure and whose owner, Xavier Niel, is one of Le Monde’s major shareholders—filtered out all commercial listings on Google for a time. Google had already threatened to boycott newspapers that demand payment for distributing their content.

Hollande, Sarkozy’s successor, took an even more combative stance. He supported the publishers and sought to reach an agreement. Should that fail, he threatened to introduce legislation. We now know how it turned out: Google is establishing a fund of sixty million euros and is prepared to provide development assistance to newspapers as they build a business model for the digital future. It’s not just *Le Figaro*, owned by the Dassault aerospace conglomerate, that is banking on this: the newspaper adopted a new look and a new structure in early April.

Google’s top executives were received at the Élysée Palace for the signing ceremony as if they were heads of state. In the meantime, there have been some relatively interesting proposals for taxing data, which is viewed as a new raw material. With the fund for publishers, Google has bought little more than a little time. With a demand for a similar amount—fifty million francs—Jewish students in France are trying to put pressure on Twitter: A French court had ordered the company to hand over the IP addresses of authors of anti-Semitic, racist, and homophobic tweets. In France, where verbal discrimination is not protected by the right to free speech, they face heavy fines and prison sentences. The purpose of the monetary claim is to enforce the ruling—which prompted Twitter to comment that the student association is «more interested in spectacular actions than in solutions,» which are currently being sought.

In the birthplace of authors« rights—a country that, with its »cultural exception,« regularly clashes with the United States—Amazon has now also become a bogeyman. So much so that, for the first time, Amazon chose not to have its own booth at the Paris Book Fair, citing »image problems” as the reason. The attitude toward Amazon is also somewhat schizophrenic: People are building golden bridges for the retailer so it will open warehouses and create jobs, but at the same time, they’re justifiably criticizing its tax practices. And, of course, its monopolistic position in online book sales, which the French book industry has largely failed to address. There is no alternative to Amazon. And in the realm of e-books, it’s clear how much the absence of pirates and pioneers leads to the same shortcomings—we’re scrambling to keep up with developments. And waiting for the government to take action. Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti has announced a whole package of measures. The lack of imagination and ideas is sobering. To alleviate the acute financial problems of small bookstores, the government is injecting five million. And it promises to assign more civil servants to monitor fixed book prices. Amazon is also accused of violating these rules because it does not charge shipping costs.

Jürg Altwegg is correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Geneva.