France Searches for its Own Google

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But say Quaero turns out to be a success and doesn't end up, a year or so hence, in the metaphorical bottom drawer of technological development hell. To what extent should European taxpayers be subsidizing this kind of initiative in the first place?

Quite apart from the legal question (and there is one, because European law stringently forbids any organization -- even a government -- from using state aid to win unfair competitive advantage), there is also the moral one. Should a government with plenty of money in its coffers do whatever it wants to exercise cultural hegemony over people?

"Culture is not merchandise," Chirac said, and in one way, he's right. But if culture isn't allowed to be merchandise and governed by free market forces, there is a serious danger that it could become something inflicted on people against their wishes. The next step is the imposition of culture as a tool to control how people think, or for whom they vote, or anything else governments might want to influence.

Quite apart from being iniquitous in its intent, this kind of "culture" tends to be boring (like the name Quaero itself, perhaps) and more prone to focus on a political agenda than on illuminating vital aspects of the human condition. A government-sponsored Internet search engine may easily turn out to be as dreary and unfun as old Soviet movies about tractor factory workers exceeding their annual production quotas.

PEOPLE POWER.

The truth of the matter, in my view, is that Chirac himself probably doesn't care two hoots about Internet search engines. After all, one can hardly imagine him doing a Net search himself; he probably has a research assistant, or several, do the job for him. And if he did do a Net search, he would doubtless find that engines such as Google or Yahoo meet his needs very comprehensively. It's no exaggeration to say that today's search engines offer almost miraculous speed and access to pretty much the entire sum of human culture -- including millions of French and German Web pages.

No, my guess is that Chirac's real motivation behind the cockeyed idea of tilting the pitch with Quaero is simply that he thinks whoever controls search engines controls people's minds -- and he wants a piece of the action. But he's going to fail.

Why? Because the Internet revolution is not, in fact, about giving power to governments, but about giving power to individuals, such as the millions who find using U.S. search engines extremely useful -- and a great deal of fun. Individual power is the future, and political leaders who don't realize it will wind up being as obsolete as Latin.

Julie Meyer is the founder and chief executive of Ariadne Capital, a London-based investment and advisory group that invests in early-stage private companies and advises later-stage private and public companies. She started the company in December, 2000, after having helped create First Tuesday, a business networking group for entrepreneurs that began in London in 1998.