Wednesday, May 25, 2011

The e-G8 should send a message very liberal in Deauville

Fewer laws and a more favorable environment for investment: not surprisingly, e-G8, which ended Wednesday night May 25 in Paris, should transmit to the eight most industrialized countries a message asking for more guarantees Free Internet business and less restrictive laws. The exact message to be relayed at the top of Deauville is not yet known, but the concluding discussion of e-G8 should relay requests rather general and focusing on the needs of the business world.

If the contents of the text should not conceal major surprises, it's partly because the summit gave pride to the representatives of Web companies, including industry heavyweights: before the close, the CEO Facebook person, Mark Zuckerberg, who is onstage for a "discussion" of an hour with Maurice Levy, CEO of Publicis, which organized the event.

Funded entirely by private funds, the summit was paid by twelve sponsors including Microsoft, Alcatel, Orange Free Illiad, whose representatives constitute the bulk of the group to synthesize the proposals. The organization that showcases the large companies has angered representatives of civil society, gathered in a group that tried to influence the outcome of a summit that they felt writing in advance.

The revelation by the New York Timesdu contents of a draft resolution, written even before the summit, made them fear that the message to the G8 leaders don not in the direction of greater repression, including the illegal downloading, and forget the freedom of expression or respect for privacy.

The prominence given to representatives of civil society at the summit was very small; John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or the lawyer Lawrence Lessig were among the few holdouts in the debates also very consensual in excluding subjects between operators and content providers, including copyright.

"It is true that these debates were mostly 'speaking entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs", expressed regret at the closing session Ben Verwaayen, CEO Alcatel-Lucent. TAXATION, BUT LITTLE ABOUT CENTRAL take the first syntheses of the debates suggested Wednesday night that the final resolution would be more "smooth" than initially expected.

It should not contain a call to toughen the fight against illegal downloading, which is substituted a sentence on the effectiveness of "technological measures", but the protection of privacy should also be absent from the text. As for the broader issue of regulation, on which business leaders were divided during the debates, it should lead to a resolution wave.

Little discussed during these two days, the thorny issue of taxation should not be mentioned in the text. In his opening speech, Nicolas Sarkozy had raised the tax liability of Web companies, whose headquarters are mostly in California or in countries with lower taxation. "Remember that it is in the commitment of your business to contribute equitably to the nation's ecosystems will be appreciated that the sincerity of your promise," he said.

"This is a credible threat to American businesses," Analysis Divina Frau-Meigs, professor at the Sorbonne and member of the Coalition for Internet governance, critical of the virtual absence of civil society to e -G8. "The issue of taxation could be transmitted to the G20, then the UN, two international forums where the U.S.

has significantly less weight than the G8. For large U.S. companies, the risk would then be it treaties under development at the Council of Europe or the OECD which set the direction for the coming years. " The message of the e-G8 in Deauville will be transmitted by a delegation consisting of Mark Zuckerberg, Hiroshi Mikitani (Rakuten), Stéphane Richard (Orange), Eric Schmidt (Google), the Russian investor Yuri Milner and Maurice Levy.

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