French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday he would not let his country’s literary heritage be taken away by a “friendly” large American company, in a thinly veiled challenge to Google.
France is anxious to avoid French-language literature being swallowed by major international digitisation projects and is looking to create its own national digital champion.
It is not the first time, France has challenged Google. In 2005, French and German leaders announced to much fanfare that they would work together to develop a multimedia search engine dubbed Quaero (Latin for “I Search”) that many saw as a direct attack on Google. The project failed for lack of funds.
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