She called Apple’s decision “brutal” and implied Apple was behaving unethically, according to accounts of her comments. The decision was made “unilaterally and without explanation,” she complained, according to the Financial Times, adding that “this isn’t virtuous and dignified behavior for a company of that scale.”

Apple’s action may be shocking to Pellerin, but removing an app from the App Store is not uncommon, especially for apps that are breaking the rules. Apple found AppGratis in violation of two iOS developer guidelines. In addition, others have reported – and I have also heard — that AppGratis was selling app makers a guarantee that they could get the app into the top 10 app charts on the App Store, which is a no-no. For its part, AppGratis denies breaking any rules.

What Pellerin wants is for Apple to renegotiate with AppGratis. But that’s not really how the App Store operates: Apple has final approval (its actions are always unilateral) and clearly reserves the right to police its App Store. However, Apple doesn’t generally ban apps for life. If AppGratis makes changes to its app so it’s not breaking rules, there’s probably a really good chance the app will be reviewed and accepted back for distribution.

As I wrote yesterday, part of the problem with these kinds of sudden removals is that they come after months or years of violating the rules. Inconsistent guideline enforcement seems to be what Pellerin is really mad about. Because those rules weren’t invoked earlier, AppGratis was able to build a business and collect millions of dollars of investment.

However, if it makes her feel any better, AppGratis is very unlikely to be the last app of its kind to get dismissed from the App Store. The company is very likely beginning a larger crackdown on app discovery apps that only exist to promote other apps.

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Last fall, a Twitter hashtag — #UnBonJuif, or A Good Jew — resulted in a number of anti-Semitic posts. Although Twitter removed the offending tweets after a complaint by the Union of Jewish French Students (UEJF), the group was not satisfied and sued to force the service to reveal the identities of those who posted the messages. A French court eventually agreed to this demand, since anti-Semitic comments and other “hate speech” are illegal in that country.

So far, Twitter has not complied with the court order — it is appealing the judgement, arguing that since it is a U.S. company it only has to comply with such demands from U.S. courts and other authorities. Meanwhile, the UEJF said it plans to file a second lawsuit in criminal court, seeking damages of $50 million for Twitter’s failure to provide the data.

A private company, but a platform for public speech

Twitter has revealed user data in several cases after being forced to do so by U.S. courts, including personal data related to several users who were supporters of WikiLeaks, such as Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir and hacker Jacob Appelbaum. Twitter also handed over tweets by two members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, after being forced to do so by a court order, although it fought against both of these decisions — and also made the request for the Occupy supporter’s data public even though it was asked not to do so.

What makes these kinds of cases so difficult is that Twitter is a private corporation with a proprietary platform, and yet it is being used as a public communications vehicle around the world, and one whose free-speech aspects are becoming increasingly important. And while we may all agree that certain types of speech are offensive, the idea that governments or courts can force Twitter to reveal the identities of those users is troubling in the extreme.

While Facebook and to some extent Google are also being used in this kind of context, Twitter is unique in the sense that it explicitly allows people to use pseudonyms. Facebook has a firm policy on the use of “real” or verified names, and while Google somewhat grudgingly allowed users to add pseudonyms to their Google+ accounts after what some called the “nym wars,” the service is still designed primarily for “real” names. Twitter is one of the only communications platforms of its size and reach that freely allows users to be known by pseudonyms.

As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (among others) have argued, anonymity or pseudonymity may allow for all kinds of offensive behavior — including the anti-Semitic comments in France and racist tweets posted by a number of users following the re-election of President Barack Obama — but protecting users’ identities is also a crucial factor that allows Twitter to be used as a communications tool by all kinds of disadvantaged groups, including political dissidents.

The free-speech wing of the free-speech party

The pressure on Twitter to resist demands like the one from France stems in part from this, and also from repeated comments from the company’s chief legal counsel, Alex Macgillivray, and CEO Dick Costolo that they are committed to being the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” The company may get criticized by some (including us) for the way it has shut down parts of its ecosystem, but its commitment to the rights of users remains.

The problem for Twitter is that as it becomes more global, it is running into country-specific demands like the one from France — or the one from Germany that led Twitter to block access to certain neo-Nazi tweets, since that kind of speech is also against the law. The risk here is that the network could easily fall victim to every government’s demands for user identities or censorship in even the most ridiculous cases, such as Turkey’s prohibition on comments that “insult Turkishness.”

If Twitter backs down on the French order, what is to stop Syria from forcing it to reveal the identities of dissidents, or Iran from forcing it to reveal who is posting anti-Muslim comments — or Britain from forcing it to identify those who were involved in the London riots, or those who post about cases covered by the country’s bizarre “super-injunctions”? Almost every country seems to have certain things that it prohibits people from saying publicly and is willing to go to court over.

But the bottom line is that freedom of speech — however offensive that speech might be — is a principle that needs all the help it can get, and Twitter deserves some credit for sticking to its guns, despite the obvious pressures it must be feeling.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Hoggarazi and Shutterstock / Rob Kints

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Combes headed up Vodafone’s all-important Europe region from 2008 to 2012, when he found himself in an employment bind. He left Vodafone to take over as CEO of Vivendi’s SFR in France, only to see the man who hired him, Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy, ousted before Combes could take on his new role. Now Combes has landed at one of world’s biggest infrastructure vendors.

Verwaayen, as promised, is staying on until April to help Combes ease into his new job.

“Alcatel-Lucent is an unrivalled technology leader in the telecommunications industry with an immense array of talent and capabilities in R&D facing major challenges,” Combes said in a statement. “This is a company I know well and I look forward to succeeding Ben, working with the key international customers, and driving the business into sustained profitability for its customers, employees and shareholders.”

Combes is taking over a troubled Alcatel-Lucent. The company has struggled since the merger six years ago of France’s Alcatel and the U.S.’s Lucent Technologies, which was supposed to create the world’s dominant telecom vendor. Instead, Alcatel-Lucent has lost ground to many of its traditional rivals such as Sweden’s Ericsson as well as newer market entrants such as Huawei.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user mtkang

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Now another analyst house has weighed in, with related but slightly different metrics. This time it’s GfK, which has been looking at the situation specifically in France and reckons that tablet sales will actually overtake those of notebooks this year. Specifically, GfK is forecasting 5.1 million tablet sales and 3.9 million notebook sales during 2013.

Why is this? GfK puts it down to the fact that tablets have gotten much cheaper, and the average price of PCs is actually going up slightly, no doubt due to the profusion of ‘premium’ ultrabooks. Also, 9.4 million French households now have more than one PC and, due to the ability of tablets to substitute in many use cases, the rise of the tablet is lengthening the renewal cycle for PCs.

Note that that’s “many” and not “all” use cases – GfK’s surveying found that 70 percent of French people don’t see tablets as an outright replacement for PCs. Also, the analyst house was keen to stress that the evolution of hybrid tablet-notebooks and the possible success of Windows 8 could change matters during the year.

Of course, this is about tablets and notebooks, not tablets and PCs as such. Most notebooks are built that way to include an element of portability – an area where tablets have them beat. I find it hard to see proper desktop machines or 17-inch laptops going away anytime soon, though, so the question in my mind is what the ratios will look like once the dust has settled on what is clearly a time of much more rapid change than we could have predicted a couple of years ago.

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Veteran tech blogger Lauren Weinstein describes this risk well in a recent blog post, in which he calls what the government of France is doing “extortion,” and warns of the long-term risk of Google acceding to such demands that it pay for the simple act of linking and excerpting content:

“There is little evidence to suggest that ‘paying off’ a party making unreasonable demands will do much more than quiet them for the moment, and they’ll almost inevitably be back for more. And more. And more. Even worse, caving in such situations signals other parties that you may be susceptible to their making the same (or even more outrageous) demands, and this mindset can easily spread from attacking deep-pocketed firms to decimating much smaller companies, organizations, or even individuals.”

As my colleague Jeff Roberts noted in his post on the Google settlement, the French originally wanted the company to pay as much as $100 million, and wanted almost all of that to go into a fund that publishers could use for their own purposes, rather than into ad buying or other joint ventures. And he also noted that with the latest deal — which comes on the heels of a similar settlement with Belgium — Google is sending a very obvious message to other countries such as Germany that it is prepared to pay.

Google’s tactics set a dangerous precedent

This may make sense for Google, since it is trying to avoid as much litigation as possible, and wants to be on good terms with European countries (where it has already run into multiple roadblocks and barriers around services like Street View and privacy concerns). But I think Weinstein is right when he argues that this is only going to encourage countries like Germany — and plenty of others as well — to assume that if they push Google on the subject of linking, they will get cash.

Google wants these payments to be seen as a helping hand to publishers, which is why the fund is described as “supporting digital publishing initiatives,” and why it puts so much emphasis on the strategic partnership angle. But regardless of the picture it is trying to paint, the settlement is being described by many as a “pay for links” deal, and that perception is dangerous. As Weinstein puts it:

“France’s complaints regarding Google related to activities that are absolutely part and parcel of the fundamental and fully expected nature of the open Internet when dealing with publicly accessible Web sites [and its] success at obtaining financial and other concessions from Google associated with ordinary search and linking activities sends a loud, clear, and potentially disastrous message around the planet, a message that could doom the open Internet and Web that we’ve worked so long and hard to create.”

In other words, this issue is much bigger than just Google. While it may serve Google’s purposes to settle with France and Belgium, and perhaps other countries as well, all that does is encourage other governments and companies to see payment for links as an appropriate strategy. How long until U.S. newspapers and publishers start to argue the same thing? What about other companies? Director Harvey Weinstein (no relation to Lauren) said in a recent interview that the U.S. should have legislation to make this a reality — and Google is helping that kind of thinking gain momentum.

It’s cruelly ironic that the company spent so long arguing (correctly) that excerpts of books were fair use in its long-running legal battle with book publishers and authors — a battle in which at least one court has agreed with the company — and now here it is paying newspaper publishers for what is fundamentally the same practice. It’s a short-sighted appeasement strategy, and we could all be the worse for it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Alexander Santander and Flickr user Affiliate

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The deal, which was first reported by TechCrunch, has closed, our sources told us, but they would not disclose a sale price. More details should emerge in the coming weeks as Nuance prepares to make an official announcement.

CEO Alexandre Lebrun founded VirtuOz in 2002 in Paris, where it raised its initial funding from French VC Galileo Partners, but later relocated to the Bay Area. The company designs the increasingly common virtual agents that appear on companies’ websites to aid in marketing, sales and customer service support. To date, VirtuOz has raised about $20.4 million, and its investors include Mohr Davidow and Inventures Group as well as Galileo.

Nuance’s own virtual agent Nina is designed for mobile apps. Making heavy use of Nuance’s speech recognition and natural language understanding technology, Nina is designed to help customers perform what would usually be complex tasks with a single voice command. For instance, instead of going through multiple steps to make a $200 transfer from a checking account to a savings account, Nina can perform the task with a single voice prompt.

That makes the companies a good fit. VirtuOz has already built up a stable of customers including Symantec, Nestlé’s gourmet coffee business Espresso, French telco SFR and Michelin (yes, VirtuOz has created a virtual Michelin Man). According to its website its virtual agents engaged in 166 million customer conversations in 2012.

Meanwhile, Nuance has been trying to bring its speech technologies to the PC, striking deals with Intel to put its virtual assistant into ultrabooks as well as promoting its traditional PC products like Dragon Dictation. This deal, however, would allow Nuance to give a “voice” to enterprise’s online customer support and sales.

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The controversy deepened on Tuesday in Paris, where Twitter told a judge that it needed the green light of an American court before it could disclose who was using hashtags like #unbonjuif (“a good Jew”) and #siJetaisNazi (“if I was a Nazi”).

The lawsuit came about as Jewish student groups asked a court to force Twitter to comply with the country’s laws against hate speech. The French government is not directly involved in the case, but a senior Minister told the newspaper Le Monde that Twitter “has every interest in adapting to the legal, philosophic and ethical culture of the countries where they want to do business.”

The situation places Twitter in a bind. On one hand, the country is obliged to comply with the laws of the countries in which it operates. But on the other hand, the French legal request goes against the First Amendment and the company’s commitment to stand up for its users’ voice.

The actual hashtag situation is unpleasant too. French tabloid L’express reports that last Sunday, the Nazi tag was “trending” on Twitter with more than 1,200 tweets — the same number as the number of tweets about actor and tax refugee Gerard Depardieu. Here is one violent example (many other Twitter users responded to these tweets by denouncing the hashtag):

#SiJetaisNazi j’lancerai la Nuke sur Israel

— Call me Pretty Boy. (@Z_ouu) January 5, 2013

The difference is that the U.S. has a legal culture where “the strongest weapon against hateful speech … is more speech” while European laws seek to use speech laws to curb racism. Unfortunately, as happened in my native Canada, hate speech laws can also become a way for groups to censor political views they don’t like.

Now the question is whether the French judge will buy Twitter’s claim that it needs permission from a U.S. court to identify the anti-Semites. According to a source familiar with the case, Twitter’s legal theory is based on the fact that the user profiles are on servers in America. But this is unlikely to work.

“The French courts have a reasonable basis for taking jurisdiction if the material is transmitted or received in France; I think that they are likely to take jurisdiction,” said Stephen Scott, a constitutional law expert at McGill University. He added that the French government’s attitude will be, “if you want to play on our rink, you play by our rules.”

Twitter could still hold out if it loses, of course. But Scott says this could lead French authorities to target Twitter’s assets and operations in Paris as a source of leverage. If Twitter simply decamped, the French would conceivably have to consider China-style restrictions on Twitter.

Twitter provided the following statement:

“Twitter does not moderate content. We adhere to the laws of the countries in which we operate and have clear rules and terms of service that govern user behavior on the platform. If we are alerted to content that may be in violation of our terms of service, we will investigate each report and respond according to the policies and procedures outlined in our support pages. You can find the Twitter Rules here: twitter.com/rules and additional support information here: support.twitter.com.”

(Image by  ollyy via Shutterstock)

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It was the French government that put an end to it. According to a New York Times report of a press conference on Monday, the country’s digital economy minister Fleur Pellerin stepped in and told Free to restore full access to the web, ads and all.

“An internet service provider cannot unilaterally implement such blocking,” Pellerin was quoted as saying. “This kind of blocking is inconsistent with a free and open internet, to which I am very attached.”

Free’s move had of course alarmed publishers who rely on advertising for their revenues. There was more to it, though.

It seems it wasn’t purely coincidental that this happened at more-or-less the same time as French regulators began to delve into Free’s alleged degradation of YouTube traffic. An email sent to a journalist by Xavier Niel, founder of Free parent Iliad, strongly suggested that the ad-blocking was just a warning shot in an ongoing war with Google. Indeed, it appears that only Google ads were blocked.

So, with its ad-blocking turned off again, Free has done what it intended to do, namely to demonstrate to Google that it can hurt the company’s core activities in France. However, Free also managed to get the relevant government minister to come out in favor of net neutrality, which is precisely what the ISP is trying to do away with. In soccer terms, this was what you might call an own goal.

The case exposes a deep irony in the treatment Google has received in France. Bear in mind that, just months ago, the French government was siding with the nation’s publishers in a bid to get Google to pay licensing fees for reproducing snippets of text in Google News. As in Germany, opponents of that stance pointed out that publishers benefited from Google News, which sends traffic their way. Now the French government and publishers are effectively holding hands in defence of Google.

However, it would be premature for the U.S. firm to break out the champagne.

“What is the financial incentive for operators to invest billions in their networks without seeing any return?” Pellerin also asked. “We have to put in place a win-win system.”

If Pellerin is countenancing a system where Google would have to pay Free to carry all that YouTube traffic, that is “inconsistent with a free and open internet”, to borrow her own words. That would be doing away with net neutrality – and, by making content delivery even more of a big money game than it already is, it would also disadvantage smaller players that want to break in.

If the French government really wants to keep the internet open, and to give French startups an opportunity to take on the likes of YouTube, it should perhaps try to make its messaging around net neutrality a bit more considered and consistent.

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As my GigaOM colleague Bobbie Johnson pointed out in a recent post, the French government has been making some strong — and controversial — statements about what it wants the company to do after an outbreak of homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic comments erupted on Twitter. The minister for women’s rights, Najat Belkacem-Vallaud, wrote in a newspaper opinion piece that the government believes the service must “respect the values of the Republic” and take action to stop or censor hate speech. She said French authorities will be discussing how to do this with Twitter, and added (translation by Google):

“Even before the work is started, it should already be possible to act to remove tweets that are clearly illegal and, at the very least, make access impossible, so that the damage already done [to homosexuals, etc.] do not persist or do not cause additional problems with young people attracted by the publicity given to this unfortunate story.”

Many governments want to use Twitter to control speech

Since French laws make hate speech illegal (as similar laws do in a number of other countries, including Canada), the minister is really just asking Twitter to do the same thing the German government did: that is, to censor speech that contravenes the laws of the country. In the case of Germany, it was tweets by a neo-Nazi group, since expressing Nazi ideologies is illegal there. Twitter explained at the time that it had no choice but to obey the laws of the countries it does business in, but that it would try to limit the impact on free speech by only blocking access to those tweets for residents of Germany — as permitted by the regional-censorship tools it announced about a year ago.

Although they haven’t gone as far as France or Germany, officials in Britain have also broached the idea of trying to restrict Twitter speech — and for what they say are similarly virtuous purposes: after the riots in London last year, the government argued that much of the violence was driven by social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry instant messaging. The authorities held discussions with most of the major players about how (or whether) they should regulate such conduct, but in the end no action was taken. Twitter has also been involved in some of that country’s infamous “super-injunction” cases, where even the mention of an injunction is considered illegal.

In some ways, the German example was the most clear-cut case Twitter could possibly have wanted: it referred to specific speech — expressing Nazi ideology — that is illegal, and is relatively easy to nail down. But this ability opens a vast can of worms for a company whose CEO and general counsel have both repeatedly referred to it as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

In Turkey, for example, it’s illegal to say or do anything that is seen as insulting to Turkishness — a law that the government has used to block YouTube videos, among other things. What if Turkey was to ask Twitter to block or ban tweets or accounts that engaged in anti-Turkish behavior? A similar kind of question came up during the recent hostilities between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, when both sides used Twitter to hurl threats at each other. What if Israel asked Twitter to ban or block Hamas accounts or tweets sympathetic to this illegal organization? What if Egypt had asked for censorship during the Arab Spring?

What qualifies as hate speech on Twitter?

The racist and homophobic tweets targeted by the French government are an even slipperier slope: even if hate speech is against the law, what 140-character messages would fall into that category? Would simply using a hashtag like #SiMonFilsEstGay (If my son was gay) or #UnBonJuif (A good Jew) qualify? If Twitter was supposed to be removing or blocking access to specific tweets, how would it determine which were genuinely hate speech? Would it have a list of banned words, or run some kind of sentiment algorithm filter on the entire stream?

In a very real sense, what the French government seems to want Twitter to do — or wants to help it do — is virtually impossible. Twitter sees almost half a billion tweets every day, and has difficulty even providing a search function that works over a longer period than about a week. How could it (or anyone else) manage to filter through those millions of tweets to remove or block access to ones that expressed specific thoughts or opinions? And even if it could, would that be the right thing to do? Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian makes a persuasive argument that it would not, although others have argued that France should renounce the “free-speech fetish” of the U.S.

As it becomes an increasingly global media entity, however — and one that controls its own platform, unlike the declining media giants of the past — this is an issue Twitter is going to have to confront head on. And how it handles these kinds of censorship demands will say a lot about how much trust we can have in this digital free-speech machine.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazzi and Shutterstock/Jirsak

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But it’s not just their love lives that French officials find tough to negotiate: the internet, too, gives them plenty of heartache.

One example? A series of offensive Twitter memes that swept through France over the past couple of weeks has provoked a strong reaction at the highest levels.

First came #UnBonJuif (“A good Jew”), which became the spark for a volley of anti-Semitic jokes. Then there was #SiMonFilsEstGay (“If my son was gay”). You can guess the rest. Clue: it wasn’t nice. France has a particular sensitivity to hate speech, and the torrent of Twitter abuse prompted Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the Minister for Women’s Rights, into action. In the pages of Le Monde, she denounced those spewing racist and homophobic messages and said she plans to start a consultation involving Twitter in the New Year to see what can be done to stop the tide.

Propos homophobes sur Twitter : en contradiction absolue avec les valeurs de notre République. Inacceptables et punis par la loi française.

— Najat Belkacem (@najatvb) December 22, 2012

Homophobic remarks, she said, were “in absolute contradiction with the values of the Republic”.

Of course she’s right — homophobia is vile. But it will be interesting to see where this goes. Is it grandstanding from a politician, or will there be a genuine policy that gets produced? The way the government chooses to act could be indicative of its approach to the internet… and it could go either way.

After all, seen in one context, this is yet another attempt by French officials to “civilize” the internet. That’s been a regular refrain from French leaders, first with Sarkozy and now under the man who replaced him. The internet — an American invention — is a debasing force on France, a threat to l’exception culturelle, and a powerful disruptor that must be kept in check.

But it’s not just France that feels this pressure. In another sense, this is just one small part of the much wider struggle between Europe’s establishment and the social media. Governments across the continent have been sent into a tailspin over internet freedoms. Germany has struggled with Neo-Nazis on Twitter, and Britain probably has the best — or worst — form on this. It’s thrown people in prison, dragged silly court cases on forever, and held parliamentary investigations into how social media up-ends the order of things.

And the battle between Twitter and free speech is isn’t just an issue in Europe, or in censorious regimes. The same questions are appearing, if in slightly altered forms, in America. Take the unmasking of Reddit troll Violentacrez, or the decision to publish the addresses of registered gun owners. Even in America, people are beginning to understand that “free speech” doesn’t mean “speech without consequences”. Exercising your right to say what you like to extremes doesn’t mean you won’t get held accountable.

Perhaps it’s all to be expected.

It’s nearly a year since Twitter announced that it would censor tweets in some jurisdictions — an agreement that it largely got blasted for, even if it was sensible. Now officials are trying to flex their muscles.

However, when new legislation gets mooted (as it inevitably does) we need to remember that almost every country already has ways of dealing with hate speech in real life, they just need to understand sensible ways of applying those laws in the online environment. For example, when Twitter users falsely accused a British politician of being a child abuser, I pointed out that legal recourse to tackle was already there. Lord McAlpine has wasted no time acting on that.

At the same time, ordinary people — who have suddenly been granted a super power — need to understand where social media slots into the spectrum between private conversation and public broadcast. After incorrect — and potentially dangerous — information rebounded around the network after the Sandy Hook shootings, I argued that if Twitter allows anyone to become their own media outlet, then we should all assume individual responsibility for what we tweet.

Nothing changes, but we need to navigate this course very carefully. Let’s see if France decides to take the high road or the low.

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