Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
La Loi du 13 mars 2000
In August 1997, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin formally acknowledged that
the Minitel, France's telematic pride and joy, had been superseded by the
Internet. The Minitel embodied a distinctively French approach to the
development of information networks in which state-owned telecoms
commanded the design of the entire network—software, hardware, infra-
structure, and services. Yet Jospin could conclude only that “Minitel, as a
network bounded by the nation, is technologically limited and threatens
to constitute a progressive hindrance to the development of new and
promising applications of information technologies.”
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In spite of the symbolic weight of this announcement, Jospin's speech
argued for the relevance of “a political vision of the Information Society,”
one that would contest “discourses presenting the inevitable effacement
of the State.” At stake was nothing less than “the economic power and the
cultural influence of France in the coming century.” And because such
power and influence would involve the development of new regulatory
and legal instruments, Jospin mandated the
Conseil d'état
to conduct an
extensive study that would fully consider any and all necessary adaptations
to French legislation. The
Conseil
did things thoroughly: 50 experts,
meeting in 3 subcommissions (protection of the individual, electronic
commerce, intellectual property), conducted more than 230 interviews
between October 1997 and June 1998, including a one-week visit to Wash-
ington and New York by a delegation.
The report began with an assessment of the new map of regulatory
institutions associated with global computing networks. It highlighted that
France had only reluctantly intervened in such institutions, in effect
leaving plenty of elbow room for American economic and cultural impe-
rialism: “This debate is international, and time for reflection is running
out. Very important international negotiations are already under way and,
for some of them, about to conclude. These negotiations, for the most part
conducted under the initiative of North American public and private inter-
ests, threaten to structure practices and behaviors over digital networks.
Tomorrow, it will be too late to defend a different conception of human
or consumer rights.”
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The challenges to such a defense were significant. The bottom-up and
distributed organization of these new networks seemed to directly and
