So, the political roadshow continues with the arrival of not-yet-a-French Presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy arriving with a huge media pack in tow.
So, what does he have to say to us eager bloggers? Well, I can't help feeling he's not talking to us, but to the attending French TV cameras. But here's a taster of the relevant stuff.
France is lagging behind on internet, he says. “We are trying to catch up. The access rate to high speed internet is good. We have exceptional bloggers.
”We are lagging behind in culture and government. The state did not create the conditions to make France a country of innovation. It wasn't ready.“
He mounted a defence of copyright and respecting people's right to be paid for the work. The internet must be one of the priority sectors along with life sciences.
There are some interesting ideas here, such as free sites with the digitised public archives on them, but fundamentally he's making an election speech to the cameras. Not much he's saying is relevant to the 50% of the audience that isn't French.
He does say that he wants to make France a more hospitable place for entrepreneurs, instead of people fleeing to the UK, Switzerland and the like.
Most controversially, he's making an impassioned flee for regulation and censorship of the internet. He's using the standard bogie man: eeeevil people abusing the internet for nefarious ends. Having ethics is not the same as restraining liberty, apparently. We must be aware that our liberty is bound (liberty is bound??) by responsibility.
In summary: he thinks we are the future and he plans on regulating the hell out of us.
Nice.
And now he's gone, without a chance for discussion. A hit and run speech.
Technorati Tags: leweb3, nicholassarkozy, nicholas Sarkozy
About the « liberty is bound??? » thing:
The very notion that liberty can be restricted by rules and STILL be called liberty is very difficult for English or American people. Actually, I don't really know about the notion of liberty in the UK, but I do know that the Americans tend to define it as the absence of constraint (especially from the State... constraint from the dominant Opinion is still quite strong and widely accepted).
Now for the French side: liberty is defined as the ability to do what you want INSIDE of a collectively defined set of rules. See Rousseau on that matter.
I'm not pretending that any of these view is better than the other. But I think it helps why a Frenchman can say that liberty should be bound without (French) people gazing at him like he was a madman. ;)
Thanks. That was a useful clarification of the French thought process.
Florent - it's just wrong to say that the idea of freedom within a set of rules is somehow difficult for Anglo Saxons to grasp. It's fundamental: consider the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights or Magna Carta - or the fact just about every political debate that happens in such countries is carried on in terms of rights - that is, in terms of a "collectively defined set of rules."
There undoubtedly is a difference between French and Anglo conceptions of liberty, but I don't think you've identified it. Maybe the distinction we should make is between systems in which everything not permitted is forbidden and those in which everything not forbidden is permitted.