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France is France

Friday, 18th January 2008

If you want to know what's wrong with France (and, by the way, what's right with Amazon) ,this pretty much says it all:

The online retailer Amazon.com said Monday that it would pay €1,000 a day in fines, rather than comply with a court ruling upholding French limits on price discounts for books.
The company decided to pay the daily fine worth $1,500 rather than eliminate its offer of free shipping on book purchases, said Xavier Garambois, director of Amazon's French subsidiary.
...The 1981 Lang law was passed at a time when booksellers were losing sales to supermarkets and other new competitors. It was meant to assure that the French public had equal access to a wide variety of books, both high-brow and low-brow, not just heavily marked-down publications.
The law has twice come before the European Court of Justice and both times it has been affirmed. The law is not considered anticompetitive because all book retailers are held to the same standard, Manara said.
In the Amazon case, a union of French bookstores won its lawsuit against the company last month over the free-shipping offer, which applies only to deliveries within France on book orders of more than €20.
The Tribunal de Grande Instance in Versailles awarded the bookstore association €100,000 and ordered Amazon to start charging for delivery. The court said if the cost of Amazon's delivery reduced the price of a book more than the 5 percent allowed by law, then the sale violated the law.

Two weeks ago the French anti-trust authority ruled against the French toy industry for precisely the opposite reasons, having a policy of a single price in France. Welcome to the world of French commerce. As President Bush (didn't) say: it's no wonder the French don't have a word for entrepreneur.