3 Apr 2009
Azor aime pas le minitel 2.0*
When I was a kid, our home shared its main door with a copper shop. The owner was an adorable woman with three dogs: two cute yorkshires and an awful poodle. Each time I had to leave for school back then, I was taking a moment to pet each dog, except the poodle because as the saying goes, he was as dumb as aggressive. And fortunately, remarkably slow.
The stupid creature had a fascinating habit: he couldn’t help but assault “closing” doors. He wouldn’t mind anyone sieging the house till you would open the door, and anyone could enter without any problem. But he hated badly anyone about to close that same door.
I even tested him several times, pretending I was going out and closing the door: he would crouch, snarling, ready to jump on the door. As soon as the door was reopened, he would just step back, eager for me to leave and lock the damn door, so he could jump and crash on it like a wild rabid beast. Clearly the poor thing couldn’t stand being locked up, but mixed between submission and his instincts, couldn’t help but assault only once he wouldn’t be able to make any harm.
Yesterday, the French Parliament approved a law about “Creation & Internet”, accepting a three strikes plan against piracy and the use of a spyware on each citizen comp “to prove they’re not guilty of anything” in case their IP would be caught in P2P systems. The Parliament discussions about the law started in February and lasted for several weeks, but to my surprise, apart from tech blogs, news sites and organizations dead against it, I haven’t heard a lot of opinions about it, except maybe a few big fat trolls.
La Quadrature still organized a French Internet Blackout, hoping they would follow the New Zealand, but as much as I could see black icons on twitter from everywhere around the world, my frenchie followers would remain full of colors, barely tweeting or posting about it, as if it wouldn’t matter. I saw several black banners, blossoming here and there, people expressing they were baffled the law had been accepted and approved, even though it was hardly applicable. “It’s Brazil becoming true!” “1984!”. Right. It is. But why the late reaction? Why shaking a fist at the sky, after everything’s done ?
Today, I see my fellow frenchies the way I was seeing that dog, Azor, running angrily at a closed door, once it’s too late to escape through it. So I asked about it on twitter. Probably thinking I wasn’t french myself, a guy answered the slow reaction was “the french way of life” and that he was “proud of it”.
Well congratulations, you just lost the Internet the way it was.
*The Minitel is considered to be one of the world’s most successful pre-World Wide Web online services, adopted by France in the 80’s. It also slowed down the deployment of the Internet there.
