So You Want to Be an ISP in the South of France?

(a public service FAQ)

Part 6: The FT Chronicles I

Ps-s-t! Wanna buy a telco monopoly?

Who hasn't dreamed of owning their very own state monopoly? In France, we almost had our chance: France Telecom, the state-owned behemoth, almost got sold. Almost.

The original, the national, hope was that the affair would bring a few zillion francs into the government coffers. These francs are badly needed to meet the Maastricht criteria for European monetary union which require that the budget deficit here come way down. Since selling off assets is easier than spending less, this represented a perfect solution.

But...

Jacques Chirac, president of the Fifth Republic, who was counting on this privatization, was also counting on winning the parliamentary election that he had brazenly and riskily called in June 97. He lost. The surprise winners, the non-reconstructed French gauche, are champions of the strong centralized state and growing l'Administration. France Telecom will belong to the People a little while longer.

Bonjour, 2000 A.D.

But, on the 1st of January, 1998, Europe's telecom markets are to be deregulated and France Telecom will have to compete. Just like the rest of us, be they state-owned or not. The BTs, MCIs, and Cegetels of the world are already scrunched up at the borders (probably twitching and ready to wet their frocks), with switches, cables, and screwdrivers in hand.

In this context, France Telecom is ripe low-hanging fruit. Their tarifs are amongst the highest in the industrialized world. They are as deftly unnimble as any other French Administration. It is true that over the last year or two they have learned how to smile (important preparation for 1/1/98, for sure), but, well, in the end this seems like the difference between sitting on a cactus and sitting on a cactus that looks like Botticelli's Venus in Spring.

Remembering Hammurabi

It's written right in the Napoleonic Code: in the eyes of the Law, the French state cannot be wrong. You can criticize it to your heart's desire over a bottle of Clement-Termes and throw artichokes at passing limousines, but no citizen takes on la France in justice. What you can do, what you're supposed to do, is wait seven years, then vote for a different government. (Now, at least, you know why France has a larger percentage of arable land cultivated in artichokes than any other country in the world).

To be fair, this part of the Code was created right after the Revolution, when frenchpersonnes had come through the traumatic experience of discovering, in rapid succession, that both God and the aristocracy were fallible. Quel choc!

Napoleon thought that by making the newly-created Democratic State infallible for a short period of time (which he called 'infallibilité transitionel' ), the People would feel reassured and the daring venture could get off to a credible start.

But no surprise, infallibility is hard to do without once you've tasted it: to this day, the French state has had the greatest difficulty accepting the idea that it may be wrong. So it holds on to its privileges. And it applies them to the people and the organisms that make up its mass. While they're seated behind the official desk, the folks of l'Administration can't be wrong either.

This has been France Telecom's basis for decision-making for years. Now, as they confront the notion that they will soon be a business like any other (well, almost) this 'droit acquis' has turned into very heavy excess baggage, indeed.

And this is the principal feature of the ISP-in-France landscape.

On to Part 2 of the FT Chronicles.