A conversation with Jean-Noël Barrot, French Minister Delegate for Digital affairs

Bonsoir, Monsieur le Ministre, dear Jean-Noël.

So

I'm very pleased to welcome you at the School of Public Affairs for this masterclass.

And

I'm very pleased that you accepted to discuss the digital agenda with our students. In a sense, I'm not very surprised you accepted our invitation, because there are four good reasons to accept our invitation. You're obviously the best place to discuss this issue, as the Minister in Charge of Digital Affairs. Second is that you're here at home, in the sense that you're a professor of the university and in front of international students. A third reason is that you're a friend of the School of Public Affairs. You're part of the committee, the strategic committee of the School of Public Affairs. And fourth, we're friends. So there are four good reasons for you to accept.

Still, I'm super thankful that you accepted our invitation. So the masterclass is going to blend two dimensions, the European dimension and the digital dimension. And in fact, there are students coming from two policy streams here, the Master in European Affairs and the Digital Affairs. So we're going to blend these two dimensions. Last point

is

that I'm also very pleased to welcome and introduce Valérie Peugeot,

who

is going to moderate the discussion with the students. And Valérie is the new scientific advisor for this policy stream on digital affairs and public policy. So thank you again, Jean-Noël. And Valérie, the floor is yours for a short introduction.

It

will be very, very short as we run

late.

So, dear Mr. Barraud, Mr. Minister, I would like also to thank you really warmly for being with us tonight. Just to introduce who is in front of you. All the students here are a member of the School of Public Affairs. Some are specialized in public policies, those European affairs. And we have a group of students, those who are sitting in front of you, who have taken a specialization in digital issues. And they will be interacting with you when we all have questions and answers later on. So I had a little introduction that I will skip. And I just give you the floor straight away. Thank you, Mr. Minister.

Thank

you, Philippe. Thank you, Valérie. Thank you, all of you, for being here and inviting me.

Sorry

for being late.

I'm

very happy to discuss with you topics around the EU digital agenda and how France looks at it. For a long time, in the digital

area,

as in other areas, what has happened in Europe is that there was a single principle that was enormously frustrating.

This

single principle was the country of origin principle. Sorry to start with this technical thing, but I'm sure you're technical people. But it's very important to understand that. It was said by the e-commerce directive of 2000. And it basically says that any member state

that

would like to impose some rules on services that are provided by a company that is established in another member state

cannot

do so

unless

the country where the company is located also imposes the same rules.

This

has generated enormous frustration. Why? Because this has led

to

regulatory dumping.

You

remember fiscal dumping with a number of companies locating in Ireland, locating in Luxembourg to benefit from better fiscal conditions.

As

you probably know, we've just put an end to that with a minimum corporate income tax of 15% that is actually going to be implemented in French fiscal law as the budget law was presented this morning by my boss, the Ministry of Economics and Finance.

So

everybody has in mind the fiscal dumping. Fewer have in mind the regulatory dumping, which led a number of big tech companies to establish presence in countries where,

you

know, the regulation was likely to be softer, like Ireland, for instance. And then enormous democratic frustration

because

we use those services

in

our daily lives. We complain every day about their monopolistic nature, about the fact that social networks bear no responsibilities, and so on and so forth.

But

we have no say because these guys are located

outside

of

France, and

therefore we cannot impose rules on them based on the country of origin principles.

And

we just put an end

to

this for a wide array of services after five years of hard work

and

the political impulse of France.

we've

put an end to this principle

by

establishing common rules in a number of digital domains.

And

this is great because we're finally going to be,

or

we have finally succeeded in setting, you know, demanding rules that big tech need to abide by. And I'm going to give you examples. But I wanted to start with this idea that for 20 years people have been super frustrated in France in particular

about

the fact that they could not do anything about big tech.

And

that thanks to the current commission, the current parliament, and thanks to France in particular that chaired the EU last year,

we've

been able to pass a number of regulations that unify

the

digital market in a number of areas,

and

therefore raises

the

level of rules that big tech have to comply with.

I'm

not saying that France was successful in raising the bar as high as we would have liked.

But

obviously, the bar is now much higher than it used to be when they were all settled in Ireland

with

a bar that was relatively low.

Let

me give you two examples of how we've been able, at the European level, thanks to France's and President Macron's commitment to make things change, and how we've been able to impose a higher bar.

One

is about

fair

competition.

One

thing that everybody complained about was that big tech

have

or implement sort of unfair commercial practices to establish their domination on certain markets.

Let

me give you two examples.

One

is that when you buy your iPhone or your Google phone,

you're

going to have a browser,

a

personal assistant that is going to be pre-installed.

So

good luck if you're the developer of a European browser

or

a European personal assistant

when

any EU citizen that buys an iPhone or a Google phone has these things already pre-installed.

It's

impossible.

Another

example

is

self-preference.

Well,

the most commonly used browser tends to show when you or not the browser, sorry, the search engine. The most commonly used search engine tends to favor when you look for a video, for instance, videos that come out of their sort of their other companies or the companies that they are linked to.

I

hope you're following me.

The

most well-known browser starts with a G and has a video service that is linked through the same corporate group that starts with a Y.

But

when you're the French video platform that starts with a D, then people have to scroll down to the last pages of the search before they find the same video coming from a company that is not linked

to

the search engine's company. This is self-preference. I'm going to move up results from my own companies and move down results from competing companies.

So

these are practices that were already illegal in Europe.

But

the thing is

that

the way they were treated is that competition authorities would investigate those matters. It would take years

and

then years down the road competition authorities would sanction

the

companies

but

the European companies that were trying to compete and that sued in the first place were already dead

a

couple of years down the road.

And

so what we did

is

set up an act, a legislation, a European legislation that's called the Digital Markets Act

that

lists 26 unfair commercial practices

and

that says

these

were already illegal

but

now we won't wait for competition authorities to investigate and see whether or not those practices happen. We're going to forbid those 26 practices ex ante

and

this is going to make a huge difference.

And

so next year

if

we convene again

then

those of you who will have bought or recently bought a smartphone

will

have had the choice of their browser of their search engine of their personal assistant.

Those

of you who value the French video service that starts with a D will not have to scroll down for pages and pages before they find the video.

You

will be able

to

chat with your friends that use a messaging service that starts with a W

without

having to download this messaging service.

So

let me say it in maybe for those that have already lost. You will be able to communicate with people that are on WhatsApp

without

having to download WhatsApp.

And

the list goes on for 24 other practices

that

used to be implemented by those big tech to establish domination markets and that will now be forbidden and of course there are sanctions associated to violation of these new rules

and

the EU commission will be able to charge up to 10% of global turnover or global sales

in

fines the first time around and 20% of global sales in case a digital company breaches those new regulations for a second time around.

So

that's a very important thing and even for those of you who are studying or are going to study competition law this is a revolution. It's the first time in history

that

competition is going to be enforced ex ante

rather

than exposed through investigations by competition authorities. The only domain where there was competition policy applying ex ante was the control of merger and acquisitions but that was the only case where competition authorities would look at things before they happen. Now the EU commission will look at things before they happen.

So

one frustration that goes away. Another frustration

and

I was the reason why I'm late is because I was the prime minister detailing our plan against cyber bullying and bullying in schools.

One

thing that was super frustrating over the past 20 years is that we've seen those big platforms take no responsibilities for the contents that were stored on their services.

And

the reason for that is that we set up the rules this way. Okay? We we assume at the beginning of the internet that when there were going to be platforms the platforms had nothing to do with the legal or illegal nature of messages that were sent through those platforms or products that were sold through those platforms. It was the responsibility of the person who sends the message

or

the person who sells the illegal product.

But

of course 20 years later this does not hold any longer. Everyone here knows that TikTok, Facebook, Instagram play a role in the way we see the messages.

And

everyone assumes

that

Amazon should have a responsibility when there are illegal products that are sold on the platforms.

And

so there was huge frustration because all those companies are located in a country that was not bothered by these questions. Okay? And so here again

the

commission, the parliament, and France pushed very hard to take another piece of legislation, the Digital Services Act

that

completely changes the situation. And that creates new obligations that

have

come into place

on

25th of August of this year

for

these big platforms. they are not going to be considered as traditional media editors. You know, media editors as a director of the publication and if there is something illegal coming out of the publication the director of the publication can be held legally responsible. So we are not going as far as that.

But

what we are saying is that those platforms they have to have in place signaling processes so that users can easily signal something that they see and that is illicit.

They

have to moderate these contents. When they see illegal content they need to signal it to local authorities.

They'll

have to share their data with researchers. They'll have to audit their algorithms. They'll have to provide an algorithm that is not based on your personal data and this is actually already in place. If you look at LinkedIn, if you look at Instagram, if you look you can now choose an algorithm that is going to push content to you that is not based on your personal data.

But

most importantly and here lies the revolution associated with this digital service act,

they

will have to analyze and correct

the

systemic risk

that

their services cause on people's health.

And

here we think obviously

of

the case of youth and children and early exposure to social networks and inappropriate content.

The

harm they cause on information and therefore the fight or the actions that they need to take to avoid this information on their platform.

And

the harm that they can cause on public safety.

And

here again, I was mentioning earlier sort of the revolution in terms of competition policy that is implemented by this EU regulation. Here, it is a revolution in terms of the liability of those big platforms. But it because it will not be only about illegal messages.

It

will be about how the service in itself can cause harm to public health, to public security, or to public speech.

Now,

of course, it will be up to the EU commission to investigate whether or not the platforms comply with these new rules.

The

EU commission will have the power to charge fines up to 6% of global sales.

That's

300 million euros for Twitter, 600 million euros for TikTok.

And

if those platforms breach the rules once again,

the

commission,

it's

a tricky procedure, but the commission has more or less the right to ban those platforms from the EU.

So

that's another important dimension of what

Europe

and France have achieved over the past five years.

I'm

not going to go any longer. I'm sure we'll talk about AI and stuff, but I wanted to mention those two pieces of legislation. I would like to finish with one word.

I

said earlier that if France

pushed

so hard for these two legislations to emerge,

it

was to put an end to this democratic frustration

caused by

the country of origin principle.

But

there is also another reason,

which

is a more positive reason, why it's important to take such regulations in Europe. It's not only to deal with big tech that are not, in their huge majority, not Europeans. It's also to provide our own digital companies with a single digital market. Because the way we look at regulation, at least in France, the current government and the current president,

is

not a way to mitigate risk or to over protect our citizens.

We

believe that innovation goes hand-in-hand with regulation, because innovation cannot happen

in

small fragmented national markets. Innovation can only happen when the European market is unified.

And

when we take those regulations on competition, on social platforms, and maybe we'll talk about what we're doing now on AI,

we're

also setting unified playground

for

European startups, and that's the best thing we can do to help them grow and then compete with the big tech giants coming from outside the US.

Thank

you very much.

Thank

you very much, Mr. Minister. So I will ask the students here to start with their questions. I think they have prepared quite a lot of questions, so there are many of them, so please

go

ahead.

Thank

you very much for everything you've said. It was indeed very interesting. So my first question is going

to

be about the Digital Markets Act, and when deliberating on this, American politicians and American experts were very dissatisfied that this piece of legislation actually targets only

non

-European countries, and

they

accused this of having a protectionist bias. So my question is, do you think we'll see more transatlantic clashes in regulating digital affairs,

and

how the elections in the US and in the European Parliament might affect this policy domain?

Well,

the American elections will have no effect on the DMA. We are the largest market in the world. We are the largest Western democracy. We don't take orders from the US. Now, it's true that there is a threshold

above

which digital companies are going to be subject to the Digital Markets Act. And hopefully, someday, I mean, there is at least Zalando, that is, Zalando is a European company that is subject to?

No,

it's not.

To

the DSA?

To the DSA.

So far, no European company is subject to the DMA, but hopefully it will come.

Now,

it's interesting that you would say that, you know, this thing with protectionism.

Because,

of course, on the European scene, French political leaders are seen, you know, whichever is their political background, as super protectionists. And sometimes, we make propositions and we fail to convince other member states

who

are not on the same line as we are, who have different relationships than we have with non-European countries and superpowers.

But

what's very interesting with the DMA, and with the Data Act, which is a regulation that is now being discussed, and that applies the same principle of ex-sante enforcement of competition in the cloud sector, that is hugely concentrated in the hands of three major players,

is

that

member

states in Europe, a lot of member states are always very suspicious when it comes to protectionism,

and

I respect that, of course.

But

when you tell them it's not about protectionism,

it's

about competition, then everyone agrees. Because competition is deeply rooted in the DNA of the European Union.

The

founding act of the EU, the European Community for Steel and Coal, was basically based on a level playing field for German and French companies. So at the very root of the EU is fair competition.

And

so when you bring competition to the table, you find consensus across member states, even those that are

typically

very hostile to any sort of protectionist measure.

Mr. Minister, thank you for coming.

I

think a lot of what you said touches on my question, but you mentioned notably how the EU is looking to tackle the topic of competition, about self preference, about basically helping European businesses compete with American ones or ones from other parts of

the

world.

My

question for you is I wonder if that approach

that

is very regulation-led

is

the right approach to create a strong European tech ecosystem. I mean I look at Europe,

we

have potentially good companies, we have a lot of startups, you mentioned Daily Motion, they came around the same time as YouTube, there is European tech talent, but I wonder if this tendency of policy makers such as yourself to maybe focus on regulation before putting in place the right conditions for increased financing or enabling companies to just grow

in

the same path or same way that American companies do, if that's the best way to move forward considering how Europe has fallen behind on that topic and how these regulatory answers that you're providing on some level are responding to

trends

that are being imposed on them by American companies. Shouldn't Europe be the one imposing its companies on other

regions? So

it's a very valid question and in fact

when

we regulate with the DMA and the DSA we are doing this in a defensive mode rather than an offensive mode because we don't own the technology.

So

it really depends, you know,

on

what topic you're going to ask your question. Ask me about AI. I will tell you that our priority is to own the technology and by the way there was a very two very important announcements today about AI and France. One is the acquisition of major computing resources by a French company and the second one was the the release of a French grown model large language model that is better than any of its peers.

So

if you ask me about AI, I will tell you that privacy, property rights, extreme risk, disinformation and so on, all this

I

don't want to

care

about until I own the technology because I want to regulate in an offensive position. When I own the technology, I set the standard. If I don't own the technology,

I'm

going to be subject to the standard that's going to be imposed just like you said by giants and I'm going to regulate you know, like a loser basically.

Now, in

terms of,

so

that's the first answer to your question. the second answer is again,

innovation

and regulation go or can go hand in hand in Europe

because

startups in Europe, when you ask them why don't you grow as fast as, you know, the US, so they will say, you know, the classic stuff, the money and so on, but you know, a lot of them will tell you I have to leave to the US or to other regions of the world because I started in France and expanding in

and

the rest of Europe is horrible because there are legislations that are very different in one country in every country and so

I'm

not saying that, you know, unifying the digital markets will be enough but we should unify all markets but unifying digital markets for digital companies or digitally oriented companies is a way to stimulate innovation and you know, and that's counterintuitive because often one sees regulation as detrimental to innovation but I believe and we've seen that, we've seen that very clearly for cryptoassets for instance. Cryptoassets, they were not regulated in the US

but

in Europe we adopted a legislation, so cryptoassets are not very popular these days but still. Five years ago France

and

I was the rapporteur of this legislation, France decided to create a legislation for platforms, you know, cryptoassets platforms.

And

we tried at the time to strike the right balance between enough flexibility to facilitate innovation, make France a sweet spot for those who want to develop such activities but also enough protections against addictions, against exposure of minors, against, you know, money laundering, terrorist financing and so on.

And

it turns out we struck the right balance because Europe,

the

EU, based their unified regulation on our regulation. But I don't want to talk about France, I want to talk about the EU. When the FTX scandal happened last year, some of you remember, it was a big scandal involving cryptoassets. Everybody panicked in the US

and

because in Europe we had a unified framework, a number, a large number of leading players in the field, they moved significant sort of chunks of their operations in Europe, in particular in France because France had been at the origin of this European framework.

And

so when you create

through

regulation a unified framework, you become more, you become more attractive market. And the third answer to your question about competition.

So

here again, there is a little bit of a tension.

In

France, politicians, they typically say, I'm tired with this competition policy in Europe that does not allow us to have big mergers, to have big players, and so on. Okay?

Well,

the academic research is not going to confirm such an insight. Competition can in many ways be favorable to innovation. It can lower prices, but also stimulate innovation.

But

people in France, you'll have a hard time to convince them that the Brussels competition policy is good. Until now,

why? Because

when competition policy is not turned against French players, but turned against the big tech, then it becomes a way to open up markets, I'm thinking about the cloud market, that are completely closed

to

new players, newcomers. Why? Because cloud companies,

they

will heavily subsidize a new customer, they will prevent a new customer firm, they will prevent the customer firm from having several cloud providers, and when the customer firm wants to change cloud provider, they will charge enormous fees.

So

of course, there are three dominant players in the field, and it's almost impossible in Europe for a French or European company to enter in this market.

So

when we are going to apply competition policy exante, when we are going to forbid

the

fines that they charge when you want to switch to another provider, when we are going to impose that there is interoperability that you as a firm can have several providers.

And

when we are going to regulate those heavy subsidies that they provide to their customer firms,

it's

going to open up the market for French and European players.

already

mentioned that you could elaborate a little bit on that.

And

what do you see as the major priorities that the EU should focus in the future in terms of digital policies? And do you have any specific policies, digital policies in mind that the

France would like to

promote

on an EU level? for

sure.

So

the AI Act,

another

example of how regulation can stimulate innovation and investment,

which

again is kind of counterintuitive. You've probably heard like, I'm no AI specialist of course, but you've probably heard like me a number of debates about autonomous vehicles.

And

the fact that at some point it was becoming very tricky because when the autonomous vehicle, the autonomous car shoots a person walking in the street, who's going to pay?

Who's

going to be responsible?

And

this is a very tricky

question

to solve.

And

until it is solved, it generates huge uncertainty for those who want to innovate in the field.

Am

I really going to invest and innovate in this field

if

there is huge uncertainty about the liabilities in case things turn wrong?

And

it's true for autonomous cars.

It's

true for those who develop medical devices based on AI and stuff like that. It's true for a number of activities.

And

so here what the regulator can do

is

clarify the liabilities. And by clarifying the liabilities, then you dispel the uncertainty and you generate interest for innovation and investment.

And

that's the initial purpose of the AI Act.

The

AI Act says one simple thing. We should regulate or we should impose some

audits

and disclosure requirements on the developers of AI systems,

depending

on what are the use cases of those AI systems, depending on what those

AI

systems will be used for.

and

so the AI Act is just a list

of

use cases for which

AI

systems are forbidden. Social scoring,

global

surveillance,

and

so on. Then a list of activities that are considered as high-risk use cases

for

which the incorporation of AI systems is subject to relatively substantial audits and transparency requirements. Examples is mobility or health because, of course, there are human lives at stake.

And

so if you want the liabilities to be well established,

the

person who develops the AI model that is then included in the manufacturing of the car that eventually shoots the person walking in the street should

audit and

be transparent about its AI system so that the liabilities can be split. And then there

are

less risky or no-risk use cases

such

as leisure, video games, and so on, for which the developers of the AI systems that are associated with these things are not subject to any sort of disclosure or transparency requirements. And France pushed a lot to

keep

this thing technology neutral, risk-based. It really depends on the risk downstream.

And

France also pushed so that we have sandboxes, namely, for young companies, small companies, the ability to develop AI systems, AI models, without having to do the audit and disclosure part too soon. Otherwise, it's too heavy to bear for a startup company.

Perfect. So

the commission, the EU commission, published its legislation.

The

council, so the governments, they basically agreed with most of what was inside.

And

in December of last year, we voted, I was there, we voted on a general approach, meaning the position of the council. It was relatively close to the position of the commission.

And

then the legislation went to the parliament, to the EU parliament.

And

it arrived on the desk of MPs

at

the same time when something else arrived on the same desk of the same MPs,

and

this something else is called chat GPT.

And

so those MPs, they had exactly the same reaction as I would have had

as

an MP, which is, this thing is super risky, it's completely crazy, we need to regulate as fast as we can. Oh, and we have an AI act that's coming to parliament, well, let's regulate it

using

the AI act.

And

so what did the EU, the MPs do? They said, so we have this thing that is technology neutral, that is really based on the risk

of

the use case for which AI is used, whichever, you know, whichever category of AI model

is

used. It doesn't really depend. And they said, let's impose on the developers of large language models, of foundational models, of generative AI models,

the

same heavy disclosure and audit requirements

that

we were, that the the act imposes on AI system developers when they are used for high risk use cases.

So

if you develop a generative AI model

for

video games, I don't care, I'm still going to impose on you the disclosure and transparency requirements.

And

I disagree with that. And we disagree with that. And we are going to push as hard as we can

for

this addition to the

AI

act coming from the parliament to get out of this legislation. Why?

Well,

for the reason I mentioned earlier.

My

first reaction when I saw chat GPT was to say this is very risky, very crazy, and so on.

But

if we want to regulate smartly

generative

AI,

we

need to own generative AI.

So

anything that comes in the way of France and Europe owning this technology,

I

will

do

everything I can to get it out of the way.

And

there is now a piece of this legislation that is now in the hands of the trilogues, the negotiation between the council, the EU parliament, and the EU commission.

And

the only thing that I will say

when

we next meet is that I want this piece of the legislation gotten rid of. And we'll go back to regulation when we own the technology.

If

I may ask, can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean when you say we have to own the technology? How are you going to own the generative AI?

Well, France

is very well positioned

to

be a leading country in the generative AI revolution.

For one

main reason, there are other reasons, but for one main reason is that

we

have the greatest talents in the field. Most of the leaders in the labs, including of big tech companies on the AI labs of the largest big tech companies are French.

And

what we've seen over the past couple of months is that these French people that were trained in our top universities

but

that were then hired by the big tech companies. These people are leaving

the

big tech AI labs

to

create their companies in France.

I

mentioned

a

few minutes ago that we had two major news

this

week because I think one was today the other one was yesterday

and

this is very promising. We also have even more promising signals

one

of which is that the founder of GitHub

GitHub

is the library of code

that

any developer in the world uses.

Well,

the founder of GitHub is creating its own generative AI company. This company is called Poolside.

This

company raised 126 million euros even before it was actually incorporated

and

this company was incorporated

in

France.

So

the founder of GitHub

who

is between the US and Canada decided to come to France

to

launch his generative AI company with enormous ambitions of course.

You

know, given the

breadth

of GitHub. So

what

we really want to achieve is to have leaders in, you know, of course, not only in the field of LLM developers

and

we have at least

with,

if I include poolside we now have at least three or four companies

that

are direct rivals to OpenAI. And

I

should also mention that when Sam Altman was in Paris, he tried to,

let

me not say discourage, but he tried to hire

those

French guys companies that were setting their own generative AI business for wages

that

I'm ashamed to share with you. So there is this that's happening, but it's not only this. Then, you know, generative AI, it's those that develop the models, but then those that do the inference, those that provide the computing power, and so on, and so forth. and we need to have an ecosystem where we are free, we are independent, we, not that every piece of every GPU is built in Europe, no, but that we own the technology, we own large language models, we have our own, or we have French or European based

large

language models.

It's

very important for a variety of reasons, for sovereignty, for independence, for what that's what I was saying, but also because since these models are going to play an important role in many dimensions of our lives,

for

companies, for administrations, and so on,

it's

unthinkable

to

have or to implement models that would be trained on the Anglo-Saxon cultural patrimony and language. We need models

that

are trained based on the French heritage, both in terms of language and culture.

I

think there's another question here. Thank you, Mr. Minister. I have a question about digital inclusion faced with the increasing digitalization of administrative services as well as private ones. What is France and Europe's strategy to ensure that those photos from the digital world are not feeling excluded and that it doesn't generate even more inequalities?

So

that's a very good question. Let me maybe share with you some numbers on the digital divide in France. One third of French citizens are, how can I translate that in English, éloignés du numeric. so let's say that half of the French citizens are digitally enabled or digitally impaired,

either

because they are not connected to the internet, either because they don't feel competent in using more. This is, and all the numbers I'm going to share are based on a very detailed report that was published by the Credoc, that I asked to the Credoc and I was published earlier this year.

And

that I confirm myself because as a colleague of Philippe Martin, I like to run regressions myself. So I obtained some data on another sample and I confirmed the results I'm going to share with you.

So

30% of people are digitally impaired.

This

is not a generational fact.

There

are digitally impaired people

at

every age of the life

cycle,

whatever. This is a social fact

because

blue colors are overrepresented among the digitally impaired

as

well as those with low levels of education as well as those with more modest income

as

well as those that live in small rural areas rather than the Parisian hypercenter.

Most

importantly,

and

pay attention to what I'm I'm going to say because I'm happy to hear students at Sciences Po care about digital divide, but you should care about digital divide

because

those

30

% or this third of French citizens that are digitally impaired do not vote any longer.

The

abstention rate

or

the abstention rate of the digitally impaired is much higher

than

the abstention rate of those that are digitally competent. So it's not a generational fact. It's not that all people don't know how to go on the internet.

It's

something that is converging

with

social divide

and

that requires an answer.

So

far

I

think we've done more harm than good.

I

think that when we've digitalized public services

we've

been guilty of digging the digital divide further

and

we have no excuse

because

in other countries of the world

digital

infrastructure, digitalization of public services have led to more inclusion

rather

than more exclusion.

Take

India for instance and if you're interested in you know digital democracy and digital inclusion you should know

about

the ADAR initiative in India. India because there was very strong political will has created

two and

soon to be three sets of public infrastructure for digital identity

for

payments and the third one I don't remember

but

for digital identity and for payments those public digital infrastructure that were forced upon

everyone

there was huge political will by Modi and so on

they

allowed hundreds of millions of Indian citizens to access public services as well as commercial services

when

they were until then completely prevented from accessing those services because they had no

ID

because they had no payment means

so

what I'm saying here is that we've as you know as the administration in France but in all other Western G7 countries

have

done a lot of harm

because

they had a lot of bureaucracy it was already very complicated

to

pay or to do stuff to do what you have to do with the administration with pen and paper

but

then the only thing we've done is to digitalize bureaucracy

and

this has become even more difficult for a number of our citizens

and

we need to correct that so the first thing we've done was 2021 during the stimulus plan where we decided to hire 4,000 digital counselors that were paid by the government and that were sent

with

municipalities with associations with agricultural chambers and so on to help people deal with digital skills

and

that's good and now we're sort of furthering this initiative by setting up local governance of the digital inclusion policy so that in every area in the country there is one

person

one you know yes there is not one person but one institution that leads this digital inclusion policy and coordinates the efforts that many people today are doing to fight against digital device so that's good but then

it

will not be enough

and

I have great hopes that the generative AI revolution can help us sort of catch up

on

what we've

not

succeeded in doing with the digitalization of public services

my

vision

even

though it's not up to my ministry to achieve that my vision is that in some years from now when we have our own models that are robust and so on when we have put the regulation and so on

anyone

can be able to access their rights and public services with the simple instrument that everyone knows how to play

your

language

this

will require political will because we'll have to streamline

the

bureaucracy in order for people to communicate and to access their rights only with their language

but

I think we can catch up on India on Ukraine on Estonia that are much ahead of us in terms of bridging the digital divide with technology

Thank

you very much I think we have to stop here I'm afraid because some people are waiting for the room

so

it was a pleasure I'm sure there are many other

No I cannot let you go

before

I answer question I think which was or maybe one previous question which is what's most important in terms of the EU agenda for the digital

and

I tell all of you and I invite you to join our efforts which is the protection of children online

this

is our big fight

this

is the president's fight this is my personal fight

in

France we have what 70 million people living in our country there are two million children that are exposed each month to pornographic content

at

12 years old

half of

young boys are exposed each month in my country in our country to pornographic content with enormous consequences on their health on their affective development and so on so we're taking legislation I'm actually going to go to parliament next week it's going to be an intense fight

but

even if I pass the legislation in France I will be fought against by

the

majors of the pornographic industry and so

at

the same time that I'm passing legislation in France I'm trying to convince

my

colleagues from other EU member states

to

follow my lead so that when the pornographic giants go to the European courts to fight against those new rules that we want to impose on them

that

France is not alone but that as many countries as possible in Europe join forces with us so if you're from other EU member states please tell your government to join forces with me

thank you

very much

I

feel really sorry because I'm sure that many of you had questions in their head but we have to leave the room now thank you again Mr Minister it was a great

interaction