France Searches for its Own Google.

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Author: Meyer, Julie

INSIGHT

Proust had his madeleine, but today's Frenchman needs a national search engine to aid his memory. Or so says President Chirac

French President Jacques Chirac loves bold and dramatic rhetoric, but it sometimes appears to be oratory for oratory's sake. When he announced last April, "We must take the offensive and muster a massive effort," adding that Europe was in danger of losing the battle for "the power of tomorrow," one could be forgiven for thinking he was talking about defending against some terrifying new security threat. In fact, what Chirac was referring to --during a somewhat self-congratulatory speech he gave alongside then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder -- was a rather bizarre plan to try to beat Google (GOOG) at its own game.

Chirac and Schroder were making public their plan to cooperate on a new technological program that they saw as having vital strategic importance. The plan was nothing if not audacious: a scheme to create from scratch a sort of "Eurogoogle." But rather than giving it some frivolous, fun, slightly subversive name, the Franco-German technological Maginot Line against the invasion of U.S. search-engine culture will be known as Quaero, a suitably serious, intellectual, and elevated name deriving from the Latin word meaning "I seek."

Whether or not Quaero turns out to be a serious competitor to Google and other privately funded search engines, Chirac clearly means business. Indeed, when he announced the launch of the new initiative, he compared it in glowing terms to another major pan-European undertaking that involves engines: passenger jets. Government funds, Chirac said, would be used to create Quaero, "in the image of the magnificent success of Airbus."

WINGED VICTORY.

In other speeches since that fateful April day, Chirac has continued to spout Euro-rhetoric with such pronouncements as:-- "We must take up the global challenge of the American giants Yahoo (YHOO) and Google.…" [Yahoo, of course, is another fun name, doubtless too much fun for this sedate and deadly serious European undertaking.]-- "Culture is not merchandise and can not be left to blind market forces,"-- and "We must staunchly defend the world's cultural diversity against the looming threat of uniformity."

But the real clue to the possible motivation behind Eurogoogle is another remark Chirac let slip during one of his other comments on Quaero. He said, "Our power is at stake." Already, the French Government -- arguably the administration in Europe with the most centralized power -- has created a special entity, the Agency for Industrial Innovation [AII], based in Paris, to oversee the project. The AII has received an initial endowment of 1.7 billion euros [$2 billion], which will reportedly be spent on Quaero and a variety of other centrally directed high-tech initiatives.

SEARCH FOR ANSWERS.

Is the comparison with Airbus fair and reasonable? After all, many of us have flown in Airbus planes; they are reliable, safe, and comfortable. But airplane manufacturing is the kind of industry that lends itself to a pan-European effort. Creating a new airplane maker required a massive amount of capital. When all is said and done, Airbus has become a decent and successful European firm -- and it doesn't come packaged with all the emotional, defensive, and indeed aggressive, rhetoric associated with Quaero.

So what exactly is Chirac up to with his fervent plans to create a serious European contender to the big U.S. search engines?

Quaero apparently promises to feature some innovations that U.S. search engines don't, such as the ability to use pictures and sounds as query terms. It may happen -- and it's very likely Google and other major U.S. search engines are already working on this important new approach -- yet experience shows there is many a slip between the cup of technological innovation and the lip of successful achievement, especially when governments are behind the projects.

CULTURE BILL.

But say Quaero turns out to be a success and doesn't end up, a year or so hence, in the metaphorical bottom drawer of technological development hell. To what extent should European taxpayers be subsidizing this kind of initiative in the first place?

Quite apart from the legal question [and there is one, because European law stringently forbids any organization -- even a government -- from using state aid to win unfair competitive advantage], there is also the moral one. Should a government with plenty of money in its coffers do whatever it wants to exercise cultural hegemony over people?

"Culture is not merchandise," Chirac said, and in one way, he's right. But if culture isn't allowed to be merchandise and governed by free market forces, there is a serious danger that it could become something inflicted on people against their wishes. The next step is the imposition of culture as a tool to control how people think, or for whom they vote, or anything else governments might want to influence.

Quite apart from being iniquitous in its intent, this kind of "culture" tends to be boring [like the name Quaero itself, perhaps] and more prone to focus on a political agenda than on illuminating vital aspects of the human condition. A government-sponsored Internet search engine may easily turn out to be as dreary and unfun as old Soviet movies about tractor factory workers exceeding their annual production quotas.

PEOPLE POWER.

The truth of the matter, in my view, is that Chirac himself probably doesn't care two hoots about Internet search engines. After all, one can hardly imagine him doing a Net search himself; he probably has a research assistant, or several, do the job for him. And if he did do a Net search, he would doubtless find that engines such as Google or Yahoo meet his needs very comprehensively. It's no exaggeration to say that today's search engines offer almost miraculous speed and access to pretty much the entire sum of human culture -- including millions of French and German Web pages.

No, my guess is that Chirac's real motivation behind the cockeyed idea of tilting the pitch with Quaero is simply that he thinks whoever controls search engines controls people's minds -- and he wants a piece of the action. But he's going to fail.

Why? Because the Internet revolution is not, in fact, about giving power to governments, but about giving power to individuals, such as the millions who find using U.S. search engines extremely useful -- and a great deal of fun. Individual power is the future, and political leaders who don't realize it will wind up being as obsolete as Latin.

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By Julie Meyer