France may not have made fighting terrorists a priority, nor did their army fully mobilize when Nazi Panzer divisions blitkrieged through its countryside — but it is preparing for all out war and the mantle of a European crusade against the influence of U.S.-based Google Inc.
| In the interest of fairness, La Belle France is fighting terrorists, just not coordinating very closely with us in the process, and shying away from confronting those "root causes" — the takfir prosyletizers and the itinerant preachers. And the Free French shouldn't be confused with the Vichy government... |
Paris has persuaded its European neighbors to join in a $128 million project to counterbalance the search engine's dominance, the Wall Street Journal reports.
| That's a battle that's already been fought. Google's at the top of the heap because it produced a better search engine than, for example, Alta Vista... |
The move comes in response to a Google plan, announced in December, to scan millions of books in American and British libraries and make them available online. As NewsMax.com reported in early May, the Europeans fear that "the continent's contribution to the pillars of recorded knowledge will be crushed by a profit-oriented California company," and the project "may end up presenting a U.S.-centric version of the world's literary legacy."
| Foisting the complete works of Mickey Spillane on a helpless world? Victor Hugo available only in English translation? Tusk tusk. We must be stopped! |
The president of France's national library, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, warned that English-language material and an American view of history would come to dominate the Internet, and French President Jacques Chirac called the Google project "an immense danger," according to the Journal. Now six heads of state and 23 national libraries in Europe have pledged their support for the continent's own book-scanning project, dubbed the European Digital Library. The European Commission has pledged $77 million to the effort and an additional $46 million to related projects, including the development of a search engine to compete with Google.
| They can prob'ly pick up Alta Vista cheap... |
"It's necessary to work together or we will be overwhelmed by America," Jeanneney said in an interview. Google says it is ready to cooperate with French and other European libraries and has already scanned books in more than 100 languages, the Journal reports.
Ironically, the French rely on Google even more than Americans. In a recent month Google accounted for 53 percent of all French searches, compared to 47 percent in the U.S., according to Nielsen/NetRatings... |