The French minister of innovation and the digital economy was in Silicon Valley Wednesday to assure Internet giants that France sees them as allies, not enemies.
Minister Fleur Pellerin’s visit came as France’s culture minister branded online retailer Amazon a “destroyer” of bookshops in the latest confrontation between the Socialist government in Paris and America’s giants of the digital economy.
“We are absolutely not in a crusade against American companies or Americans,” Pellerin said during a press briefing Tuesday in San Francisco.
“My purpose here is absolutely not to declare the war to America,” she said.
“One the contrary, my purpose is to visit great tech companies and discuss with them the possibilities of partnerships and what synergies we can develop.”
Pellerin is scheduled to meet Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg on Wednesday. Other spots on her agenda included Twitter, chip-maker Intel and Airbnb.
She also said she would urge Google to channel more venture capital to France.
“I really love America and think we have great things to do together,” Pellerin said.
In France, Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti took aim at Seattle-based Amazon.com.
“Everyone has had enough of Amazon, which, by dumping, slashes prices to get a foothold in markets only to raise them once they have established a virtual monopoly,” Filippetti said Monday.
“It is destructive for bookshops,” the minister said at a conference of booksellers in the southwestern city of Bordeaux.
Filippetti said that she would be examining measures that could curb Amazon’s growth in France by restricting the company’s ability to combine offers of free deliveries with discounts of up to five percent on cover prices, which is the maximum allowed under legislation designed to protect small booksellers.
The attack on Amazon is the latest in a series of disputes between France and US companies including Google, Yahoo! and Apple.
French authorities are already embroiled in a dispute with Amazon over a $252 million tax bill related to the company’s sales in France between 2006 and 2010.
Industrial Renewal Minister Arnaud Montebourg last month infuriated Yahoo! by placing a series of conditions on its proposed takeover of French video-sharing site Dailymotion, causing the deal to collapse.
Yahoo! was not on Pellerin’s itinerary.
France is meanwhile at loggerheads with Google over privacy issues and over demands that it pass on part of its advertising revenues to newspapers and other content providers that the search engine links to.
The Paris government has also clashed with Apple and other hi-tech manufacturers over proposals to tax smartphones and tablets to fund French-language creative and artistic projects.
France minister in Silicon Valley seeking allies
