Shadow on the City of Light

By Martin Lowe

French Internautes Roll Back the Borders of Cyberspace.

Ever since around 2004, when Morse internet was phased out, to access the internet in France, one has needed to acquire one’s very own edition of the infamous “Box”. The original “Box” - the nationalised “LiveBox” – was the only, and state sanctioned, path of entry as recently as 2005; itself a large, triangular, semi-translucent white plastic case, buttressed by metallic mesh sides, adorned by energetically flickering red LEDs, and a neurotically flashing France Telecom logo worthy of an apartment neon sign, large enough to cover the front of a hardback book. I still have one on my work desk, and it has been neutralised by folded sheets of paper from the day I received it in the post in a large, elaborate kit in December 2004. Visiting a colleague’s office last week, I noted that I could not easily find his “LiveBox”, but it was still there, hidden at the back of the bottom shelf of one of his book cases, mercifully shielded from view behind opaque, rarely used tomes, such as a 1989 Vidal medical dictionary and his university yearbook.

Yet by today, the choice for internet customers is somewhat broader, with the government granting concessions to companies like Neuf-Cégétel, Noos (now Numéricable), Alice (Telecom Italia), Darty, Free, and several others, all fighting to capture the ever fresh crop of first-time users, but also to recruit the brazened, state-enslaven ‘internaughts’ (internet users), via offers as alarmingly similar in content, as their prices are breathtakingly low (€30 per month, including unlimited cost-free international telephony, and innumerable television channels).

Against this backdrop of radical change in the échelons of French society, a situation considered akin to re-stitching the very intellectual and ethical fabric of the nation, we at Shadow went out onto the street, to poll the ordinary people of Paris, asking them if their expectations are met by this gaggle of operators, and in more general terms, what use they make of the internet, what the current advantages and drawbacks of service may be in contemporary France and what, if any, their wish list might look like for future improvements:

“The informations available on the internet are usually not in French, and it is too heteroclite, so it is not possible to know what is true and what is not true”, said a young marketing manager working with the Beauté Prestige group close to Place Vendôme.

“It is not possible to have a paper trace. Everything is ephemeral. There are many important documents in France that we must keep for either 5 years, or 10 years, or for life, and after.

There are many important documents in France that we must keep for either 5 years, or 10 years, or for life, and after.

“Everything is on the screen. It hurts my eyes”, said a strikingly brunette English student from Romania.

“To have the content everywhere on the internet in English, including, but not limited to, so many advertisings in English, is a violation of French national law. All mentions in English must be accompanied by an asterisk, with the French traduction appearing below, approved by the Académie Française. The persons responsible for these transgressions should be brought to France and come before the Justice. We cannot allow ourselves to make another American exception”, said tax inspector Jean-Marie Gilles.

“The administrators of the sites are often in the foreigner country, and it is not possible to attack them if we need to”, said temp Anne-Laure at a Monoprix supermarket near the St. Augustin church in the 8^th district. It is also not possible to call them by phone, or by the minitel. They just surf away, and some of them can be gay. Also there is many mens dressed up like a young girl, as we could see in the recent government billboard information campaign, they uses the web like a spider”.

Sondrin, a factory worker from the Picardy region north of Paris, pointed out “Pirates can come and steal your informations, especially for the internet bank and shopping. . .and there should be an internet Help Line green ‘phone number.  It will be more écologique, je pense.”

“The foreigners can come and profit from the internet in France indemnes, and they can surfer around the France now, without using passport, no visa, identity card, or Carte Bleue (Visa debit card)”, continued a person calling herself Madame Da Silva, a sex industry worker in the St Denis red light district.  “There is no control over identity on the internet, so we do not know who is there, or who is capturing our informations and photographs. If we establish a phone connection, we must provide certain papers, including the identity card, the proof of address, the salary proof, the standing bank, etc. But for the internet, we have no control at all, which makes it a dangerous place”.

Zohra, a secretary working in a real estate agency close to the Stalingrad metro station, told us, “I like the idea of the Internet Tickets the best. It is like the Tickets Restaurants, quoi. To access the internet, you have a special ticket with an individual number, that your company gives you at the end of the month. Every ticket has a unique number, and according to the value, you can remain on the internet, 5, 10, or 20 minutes, according to the coefficient code of your job. You enter the number on the internet page. Like Tickets Restaurants, the ‘Ticket Internaute’ should be valid in all countries, so that French people can check their courriel (Email) when they are on holidays, or perhaps business trip. With the ‘Ticket Internaute’, you could even have access to as many as 20 approved web sites, such as Météo, Infos (TV news), poker, and, for example, to find the SNCF train times’ actuality”.

“The best idea is to have a kind of formule of the internet access; like a menu we can find every day for the lunch. Valable only at midday, it could provide a certain parcours of informations, suitable for all the people. We could have a mise-en-bouche of the news of pipol like Sarko and Carla, and for the entrée, we could start with a synthèse of the national news, and for the plat principal, alors a subject of actuality, like the environment and the Vélib, then instead of coffee or desert, the sport’s news or maybe something a bit more coquin, like the Minitel Rose, with Lovisaa, and Lula code 69, or Lova Moor. . .” added Aurélien, a politics student at Paris’ Sorbonne university.

“There should be an automatic, obligatory translation of all the internet pages into French. We are in France and the language here is French.

“There should be an automatic, obligatory translation of all the internet pages into French. We are in France and the language here is French.

His neighbour enjoined: “Ah oui. . .the scratch-card system actually available in cafés and bars since 5 or 6 years, is a very good one. When you buy a coffee or a lunch, you get one scratch card, for access to the internet, with your own secret code. It is a good way to control the internet use in public, because we know whether or not the client have made a true consommation, or whether they just came to the café for to profit from the internet, because of their unique identifying code, which is secret. It is possible to know, by this manner, if they have had a true coffee or Perrier or perhaps an omelette, or just a quick one to check their Email, and the serveurs (waiters) working do not have to make a surveillance of what pages the particular people are consulting, because the navigation lasts only 15 minutes every time they make a purchase. It is a very logical system which weeds out the bluffeurs, and we have good control of the internautes”.

Said the female proprietor of a souvenir stand close to the Trocadéro, opposite the city’s iconic Eiffel Tower, “I remember the movie Traque sur Internet, with your Sandra Bollock’s. Because of internet, all the society is becoming like this now. You cannot talk to anyone any more. Everybody just looks at his screen or texto (SMS) and does a chatte. Soon we will be implanted with a puce or chip that drives us to eat every day at McDonald’s, quoi. Où est-ce que tout ça va finir? (Where is all this taking us?)”

She continued, “Like with certain persons during the Vichy time, it might not be a bad idea to have a symbol applied to every web page, to show its origin, a bit like the “VF” (Viande Française – French Meat) origin sticker on beef. That way we could know if the origin of the page is French, or Anglo-Saxon, Jewish, or, perhaps Scandinave. A page on the sexual liberation. Why not. At least we would know who we are dealing with”.

“I do not like the internet in my café. I have only a little ‘weefee’ (wifi) connection, mais bon. . .it scares away the clients. They see the students sitting there playing on the net, and they think this is an establishment not sériouse. . .it drives the real customer away, and I have to make a business here, malgré Sarko. Just last week I had to throw out two tourists and one French student, who were trying to use their portables without first confirming their order. And one of them could have been a lesbian”, said the owner of the Garance bar, at 96, Quai de Jemappes, on Paris’ prestigious Canal St Martin.

Finally, we were stopped at Place de la République by Rafa, an aid worker for the French NGO Action Contre la Faim, on his return from Africa, where he had been working with underprivileged children, and who, after some negotiation, shared with us, “The internet is not enough friendly for dogs. Especially dogs for the blind. There is no place for them to do their business or socialize”.

(c) Martin Lowe 2008