France Declares War on US Content Industry

Jacques Chirac is apparently fed up with Hollywood and the rest of the American content industry supplanting European culture. And so the race is on to build a counter-weapon: a government-sponsored eurocentric search engine.

The Telegraph writes:

French president Jacques Chirac yesterday pledged to help fund a new European internet search engine to rival Google and Yahoo as he railed against what he sees as the threat of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. . . .

Mr Chirac's intention is to provide forgivable loans to a Franco-German "multimedia search engine for the internet".

Between the Lines responds:

Next, Chirac . . . is going to claim that Google and Yahoo are hiding WMD in their algorithms. Cultural imperialism is a scourge, but creating another multimedia search engine and fomenting a search technology arms race is not a solution.

Prior posts:
    Aug. 30, 2005 - Chirac Pleas with High Tech Business to Stay in France.
    Apr. 3, 2005 - Googlephobia in France.

Update: More at IP Democracy:

French President Jacques Chirac is on a crusade to stamp out Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism by mounting European competition to Google and Yahoo. I kid you not.

Update (Sept. 2): Apparently, Google is listening to the European complaints, as Yahoo! News (AP) reports:

Google Inc. is asking European book publishers to submit non-English material to its Internet-leading search engine — a move that may ease worries about the company's digital library relying too heavily on Anglo-American content. . . .

Google hopes to substantially increase the volume of non-English books in its database . . . .

If Google achieves that objective, it could mute European critics who sniped at the company earlier this year for giving a top priority to scanning English-language books.

More: Slashdot.