French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday he would not let his country's literary heritage be taken away by a "friendly" large American company, in a thinly veiled challenge to Google
[Snip]
We won't let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is," Sarkozy said, without naming Google.
At a public round table meeting in eastern France, the president said digitisation of books would be one of the projects financed by a planned national loan, which is due to pump billions of euros into strategic investments in 2010.
"We are not going to be stripped of what generations and generations have produced in the French language, just because we weren't capable of funding our own digitisation project," he added.
[Snip]
The government has also urged the European Union to agree on a massive digitisation project, effectively taking on Google.
It is not the first time, France has challenged Google.
In 2005, French and German leaders announced to much fanfare that they would work together to develop a multimedia search engine dubbed Quaero (Latin for "I Search") that many saw as a direct attack on Google. The project failed for lack of funds.
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