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Institute for the Study of Diplomacy
Case Study
Case
308
GLOBALIZATION:
France, Nazis, and the Internet
Robert A. Denemark
Cover photo source: https://pixabay.com/en/abstract-geometric-worldmap-1278059/
Case 308
Globalization:
France, Nazis, and the Internet
Robert A. Denemark
ISBN: 1-56927-282-4
Copyright © 2005 by the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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or otherwise without the prior permission
of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.
The opinions and analysis contained in this
case study are solely those of the author(s),
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, the School
of Foreign Service, or Georgetown University.
1316 36th St. N.W. Washington, D.C. 20007 | isd.georgetown.edu | [email protected]
This case study was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The
statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
Globalization: France, Nazis, and the Internet
ROBERT A. DENEMARK
UNI VER S IT Y OF DELAWARE
No greater instrument of globalization exists than the
Internet. It allows us to communicate across vast distances and problematic borders in real time. We can
post or download information, images, or ideas and sell
products or purchase goods from around the world.
This new openness is not universally appreciated. Societies with conservative moral codes, closed political
systems, and vulnerable economies may view such
transparency as a threat. Not everything offered on the
Internet is uncontroversial. Explicit sexual images, seditious political ideas, and cutthroat economic competition are not always appreciated.
We often hear about smaller, poorer societies
opposing globalization, some quite violently. But why is
resistance found in richer and more established countries? France is an unlikely place to find serious opposition to globalization. It has an established history as a
powerful and cosmopolitan nation. France has long
been the tolerant home to political refugees from rightist, leftist, secular, and religious parties. French art, cuisine, fashion, philosophy, and literature are world
renowned. With a legal drinking age of sixteen, nude
beaches, and a tolerant atmosphere, France is hardly
the kind of place one would expect to find a backlash
against globalization.
Yet in August 1999, a protest against a World Trade
Organization (WTO) ruling in favor of U.S. beef producers featured the destruction of some of France’s
McDonald’s restaurants. McDonald’s had long been
accused of serving unsafe food that tastes bad. “Who
were WTO judges to rule that the American cattle
lobby could force potentially harmful hormone-treated
beef down the throats of European children?” (Meunier
2000:109). Nine months later, in May 2000, a French
judge ordered Yahoo to restrict its online Web auctions
so that they could not be accessed from France. It is illegal to sell items associated with race hatred in France,
and Yahoo had been allowing Nazi memorabilia, along
with objects related to such groups as the Ku Klux Klan,
to be auctioned from its site. The French consider such
symbols inappropriate in an enlightened society and an
offense against the nation. The French court threatened
fines ranging from $13,000 to $150,000 per day. But
Yahoo is not a French company nor was the auction taking place on French soil. Should countries assert the
right to determine what kinds of ideas, goods, or services may be accessed by their citizens, or should the
technology of globalization be allowed to overcome
such old-fashioned restrictions?
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Robert A. Denemark
FRANCE
France has long been considered a highly cultured
nation, though there is an ugly underside to French history as well. With its victory over Germany and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, France was
able to enjoy significant gains despite losing one quarter
of its male population between the ages of eighteen and
thirty. Only the return of the Alsace-Lorraine region,
and increased immigration from outside Europe, provided sufficient labor for the French economy to survive (Gagnon 1972:328).
Germany’s colonies were divided up among the
victors, and Germany was made to pay reparations to
the Allies for the cost of the war. Millions in currency,
gold, and raw materials were transferred to France in
the years following 1918. Germany suffered defeat,
humiliation, poverty, and instability. But as hard times
came to France and Britain as well, extremist politics
were left unchecked in Germany. Nationalists blamed
the loss of the war on foreigners and foreign elements,
while racists were allowed to choose the scapegoats.
Democratic politics failed, and a new radical regime
began its quest to reorder Europe. Britain and France,
mired in economic depression, stood by and watched.
Germany repudiated its debts, remilitarized, and its
threats won it political concessions. In 1938, British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain visited Germany
to negotiate for “Peace in our Time” and left Nazism to
grow. The rest of Europe followed the British lead.
Peace was not the outcome, and the war found
France pitifully unprepared. Its military was poorly
trained and equipped, and its officers had prepared to
fight World War I over again by building systems of
trenches and balancing railroad timetables for the
movement of ground troops. France declared war on
Germany after the invasion of Poland in September
1939, but no action took place for half a year. The
French waited near their trenches while the Germans
polished new tactics. When the shooting war began, it
only took about six weeks for the French army to fall
apart. Germany found revenge when it forced the
French to sign the articles of surrender in the same rail
car that the Germans had been forced to use in 1918.
Two thirds of France was placed under direct German
control, while a new collaborationist government centered in Vichy under the rule of Marshal Henri-Philippe
Pétain, a hero of the World War I, was allowed to
administer the remaining territories.
This was a particularly bleak period in French history. Pétain argued that “[If ] I could not be your sword,
I tried to be your shield.” (Cited in Paxton 1972:358)
The collaboration of the Vichy regime was supposed to
be a necessary evil, imposed on France by German military might. The Vichy regime was to shield at least
some of France from the brutality of Nazi occupation,
providing a safe haven for resistance of both an official
and a covert nature. The defection of General Charles
de Gaulle to England helped salvage French selfrespect. With the allied victory, France was magically
transformed (for political reasons) from a Nazi collaborator to a victim, then to one of the victors of World
War II.
But the “myth of resistance” was a bold lie. The
offer to collaborate with the Nazis was actually a French
initiative, according to Robert Paxton’s Vichy France:
Old Guard and New World Order, 1940–1944. A deeply
divided France could not stand against the Nazis in part
because so many Frenchmen were ready to join them to
secure an advantageous place for their country in the
new Nazi order. Twentieth-century France had been a
hotbed of radical and violent right-wing politics. The
rise of fascist paramilitaries, the framing of Jewish officers (to protect Christian officers who committed treason), and blatantly anti-Semitic calls for the
assassination of Jewish politicians were regular occurrences (Gagnon 1972:380, 400–1). Some, like Dr.
Edward Arnold of Trinity College, Dublin, wonder
whether fascism was in fact a French invention (Arnold
2000:ix, 34–5). Finally, Vichy officials pledged to
destroy the organized resistance, which others saw as
the only hope for the future of France. Vichy created a
much-hated internal security force to crush political
opposition, while Vichy First Minister Pierre Laval
worked to unseat the more restrained Pétain and called
openly for a German victory. It is no exaggeration to
suggest that Laval was “the leader of one side in a
French Civil War” (Gagnon 1972:454).
After World War II ended, France created a new
image for itself as the center of resistance to Fascism,
even though far more Frenchmen had willingly supported the Nazis than had fought against them
(d’Appollonia 2000:177). The irony is that the citizens
of Vichy were treated no better than those of occupied
Globalization: France, Nazis, and the Internet
France, even as their leaders helped support the Nazi
war-making machine. Resources, skilled workers, and
political refugees were turned over to the Germans in
abundance, even more than from some other occupied
countries (Paxton 1972:371–4). When World War II
came to a close, France was a shamed and divided
nation.
The post-World War II era was a difficult one for
France. The fundamental disagreements that had
existed before the war had often led to violence, and to
these were added the recriminations and hatreds that
emerged with defeat and occupation. After the victory
one did not ask another what they did during the war,
for fear of an honest answer. The threat of renewed
internal violence, even civil war, was to remain a real
concern for more than a decade after the allied victory
(Gagnon 1972:513). In part as a way to protect themselves, the French worked to forget, ignore, or suppress
their history. A collective amnesia overtook the country
(Golsan 200:30).
It was not until the 1980s that the French began to
confront their shameful past, first in literature and the
cinema, and later in court cases, memoirs, and political
biographies. Vichy’s police director, René Bousquet,
had happily aided the Nazis with the rounding up of
Jews and had curried favor in so doing, according to
Richard Golsan’s Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France. As a successful postwar entrepreneur (banking, a newspaper) he was a close friend of
French President François Mitterrand, dining with him
often. Bousquet’s original postwar trial was a sham. One
juror was a close friend, while another proudly wore the
medals he had won as a Vichy functionary. Later legal
action against Bousquet was undermined by the French
government, then he was assassinated before a new trial
could begin (Conan and Rousso 1998:147–9). Another
Nazi collaborator and Vichy police official, Maurice
Papon, later served in France’s bloody struggle to control Algeria. Then, as prefect of police in Paris, he organized the 1961 beatings, arrests, and detentions of
eleven thousand Algerians protesting a special 8:30
p.m. curfew aimed specifically at “Muslim Algerian
workers.” Hundreds were murdered, and the records
were conveniently lost (Golsan 2000:168). The immigration required by France’s demographic losses in the
World Wars I and II was proving difficult to manage.
3
Entire French corporations also had dubious roots.
Michael Bar-Zohar reports in his 1996 book, Bitter
Scent, that the cosmetics multinational L’Oréal, a highprofile French firm, was founded by French fascists and
became a haven for Nazi collaborators and racists after
the war. Several key executives with Nazi backgrounds
and sympathies were sheltered by the French government at the highest level. Finally, the much-lauded
President Mitterrand, who ruled the republic for fourteen years, was revealed in a 1994 biography to have
been an early profascist journalist and Vichy official.
The revelation rocked the French population: “France’s
Vichy period was not an aberration, a break with what
had gone before, as historians had long maintained, but
the continuation, indeed the fulfillment of reactionary,
authoritarian, and xenophobic attitudes that had been
there all along,” (Golsan 2000:122).
France has an image as an advanced global power.
Its businesses include many giant corporations, and
Paris is an international transportation, financial, and
cultural hub. On its own, France boasts the fourth largest economy in the world and a population of about
sixty-one million. More importantly, it allied with Germany to push forward the consolidation of the twentyfive-nation European Union. France sits at the core of a
united Europe, with a population of three hundred
eighty million, about one third more than that of the
United States. Yet an October 1999 French poll found
60 percent agreed that globalization threatened French
identity. Some 73 percent believed that a united Europe
was one of the only realistic alternatives to U.S.-dominated globalization (Meunier 2000:111, 114). Just
beneath the surface, there seems to be a fear of the symbols of France’s past and an uncertainty about its future.
Was France’s attempt at censoring Yahoo the act of a
highly sensitive and civilized society, or of a society that
cannot yet deal with its own imperfect history?
NAZIS
Why is there fear of the Nazis in Europe? Nazism was
soundly defeated in World War II, and is outlawed over
much of the continent. That does not mean, however,
that the movement has not enjoyed periodic political
successes, especially during tough economic times.
New (neo) Nazism is a movement that identifies with
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Robert A. Denemark
World War II era German leaders, the swastika, antiSemitism, racism, and xenophobia. In recent years,
both neo-Nazis and other far-right parties have been
particularly successful in galvanizing support around
anti-immigrant sentiments.
France has a significant set of neo-Nazi, racist, and
other far-right political groups. Many smaller groups
are engaged primarily in publishing radical newsletters
(for example, Bloc Identitaire), maintaining Web sites,
and serving as umbrella organizations to help smaller
groups of like-minded radicals coordinate with one
another (BBC 2002: August 8). In 2000, the most
important far-right parties in France were the National
Front (FN) and its 1998 offshoot, the National Republican Movement (MNR). The National Front was led by
the openly bigoted, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic
Jean-Marie Le Pen. Founded in 1972 on an anti-immigrant platform, the FN has polled between 14 percent
and 18 percent of the vote in presidential elections, a
significant percentage in France’s rather complex political system. It won thirty-five legislative seats in 1986
and had candidates in 563 of the 577 legislative districts
for the 2002 election, though very few of them won
(BBC 2002: May 20). Its most stunning victory came in
the presidential primary of 2002, when it received about
18 percent of the vote, enough to defeat Prime Minister
Lionel Jospin and put Le Pen in second place. Polls suggested that upwards of 22 percent of the electorate
agreed with the FN platform (Anti-Semitism Worldwide). A vast, cross-party coalition formed to oppose
Le Pen, who was defeated in the final round of the presidential election.
The MNR broke away from the FN during a power
struggle in 1998. In 2002, it was able to field candidates
in each of France’s 577 legislative districts, but won only
670,000 votes (BBC 2002: May 20). The party collapsed
under a mountain of debt, and suffered further when
one of its former local council candidates attempted to
assassinate President Jacques Chirac at the annual Bastille Day Parade in July 2002. Even Le Pen’s party
seemed to be falling apart as he came closer to retirement following the 2002 elections. Nonetheless, France
has continued suffer both anti-immigrant and antiSemitic attacks, especially in the wake of the second
Gulf War. Anti-Semitic attacks rose some 600 percent
between 2001 and 2002, though much of the violence
seems to have been generated by the many Muslims that
now live in France (BBC 2004: March 31; Bergmann
and Wetzel 2003).
In France, you cannot buy or wave a Nazi flag, but
you can find candidates with Nazi backgrounds who
favor Nazi-inspired policies. The laws against outward
signs of fascism seem to be convenient cover-ups for a
much deeper problem. So why should Yahoo, or anyone
else, help the French hide their past indiscretions and
their current political embarrassments? Perhaps globalization, and the transparency brought about by the
Internet, could help France deal openly with these
issues?
The stakes in such a debate are high. France is not
alone in its struggle with neo-Nazi groups. In Germany,
right-wing parties have generated periodic attacks
against Turkish workers, including deadly firebombings. The neo-Nazi movement gained additional
momentum after the much poorer East Germany
became part of the country. In June 2000, three neoNazis in Dessau kicked a German citizen originally from
Mozambique to death because, they told police, they
hated foreigners (Broomby 2000). The German government reported thirty deaths from racist violence
between 1990 and 2000, while human rights groups
suggest the true number is nearer one hundred (BBC
2000: August 31). A BBC correspondent interviewing
young Africans in Dessau was told, “I’m only speaking
to you because you are not a German journalist. I don’t
trust any of them, and I don’t trust the police. If we are
attacked, we wouldn’t call them because we are more
likely to end up in trouble,” (Bromby 2000). In a show
of strength, neo-Nazis staged a march in Halle in August
2000, where the trial of their three compatriots was taking place. One of the results of the wave of attacks was
an attempt to ban the radical right-wing National Democratic Party, because it had been actively campaigning
for foreigners to be kicked out of Germany (BBC 2000:
August 30).
In Belgium, the anti-immigrant and xenophobic
Vlaams Blok became the third-largest party in the economically powerful region of Flanders and increased its
power on the Antwerp city council by winning 33 percent of the vote in 2000. The Blok was the largest party
in two major Belgian cities. Among other issues, the
Blok pledged to end all immigration, close mosques,
and create separate schools for immigrants “who have
failed to integrate,” (BBC 2000: October 9). The Vlaams
Blok leader claims his inspiration was Austrian Freedom
Globalization: France, Nazis, and the Internet
Party leader, Jörg Haider. The child of Nazi parents,
Haider has often argued that World War II Axis veterans
were unfairly maligned for fighting for a world where
“the younger generation should have a future in a community in which order, justice and decency are still
principles,” (cited in Sully 1977:128–30). Haider’s close
ties to Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi, and a statement
during a parliamentary debate that “the Third Reich . . .
had a sound employment policy,” led to more accusations (Sully 1997:66–7). Despite this, Haider’s anti-immigrant and anti-European Union positions
consistently won him governorships and, finally, with
29 percent of the vote in 1999, partnership in the 2000
coalition government that took power in Austria.
Though Haider himself was eventually forced to resign,
Austrian neo-Nazism did not seem to be much in decline. Austria’s President and former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim had been banned from several
countries, including the United States, for hiding his
World War II service as an officer in a German military
unit charged with killing captured partisans in Yugoslavia and Greece and deporting Jews to death camps.
Waldheim won one of only two medals given by the unit
in 1942. After the war, the unit’s commander was executed for ordering massacres and other war crimes,
(Pelinka 1998: chapter 9).
In Sweden, the far-right-wing movement was large
enough to lead the government to form an agency to
help individuals who wanted to escape from any of its
thirteen well-known neo-Nazi groups (Sharma 2000).
Once again, the groups focused on the immigrant issue,
used violence (including the murder of police, politicians, and sports figures), and espoused rabid anti-Semitism (Mansel 1999). Other well-organized neo-Nazi
movements can be found in the United Kingdom, Italy,
Russia, Romania, Switzerland, Norway, Poland, and
especially the United States, which is home to dozens of
groups that have committed murders and other acts of
violence. Many of the United States groups are well
organized, well funded, and prominent on the Web.
U.S. Web-based recruitment sites for hate groups often
hide behind an “informational” format, using slick
graphics and neutral-sounding language to mask bias,
especially from younger readers. “Many people who
teach speech and writing have begun to notice that
more and more students want to give a speech or write
a paper about some ‘informational’ topic, which turns
out to be based on ‘information’ from one of these hate
5
sites,” (Gurak 2001:61). Of the eight hundred pro-Nazi
Web sites aimed at German Internet users alone, some
90 percent are maintained in the United States (Bartlett
2000).
THE INTERNET
Three immediate questions emerged when the French
court ordered Yahoo to restrict access to auctions of
Nazi materials. Were the French on solid legal ground in
their attempt to restrict Internet content? Would it be
best for Yahoo to avoid the nasty press associated with
the sale of Nazi paraphernalia and comply? Does the
technology of the Web lend itself to such restrictions in
any event?
Yahoo made certain to obey French laws on its
French Web site. Nothing related to Nazism or other
hate groups appeared. But individuals in France who
wished to review and perhaps bid on such items could
easily access U.S. Yahoo auctions. The site featured
hundreds of Nazi-related items daily and as many as one
thousand items that were inconsistent with French antihate laws. These included relatively minor collectibles
like stamps and coins, along with goods of a more dubious nature like replica canisters of the Zyklon B gas
used in the death camps, small arms, and swastika flags.
One BBC journalist reported, “Some people buy this
stuff out of political sympathy for the Nazis. There are a
lot of people with SS daggers hanging over the mantelpiece” (BBC:11 August 2000b). In April 2000, The
International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism sought an injunction in the French courts against
Yahoo, claiming that such sales were an affront to the
nation. They were later joined by the Union of Jewish
Students. In May, Judge Jean-Jacques Gomes ordered
Yahoo to stop making such auctions available to the
French public, ruling that their presence was clearly
illegal under French law. The plaintiffs were awarded
nominal damages of about $1,400 each, and Yahoo was
warned that it would be fined $91,000 per day if access
were available in France beyond July 24, 2000 (Gold
2000). Can the French court extend its legal rulings to
the United States, and perhaps the whole world?
The sale of Nazi symbols, like the Nazi Party itself,
is legal in the United States. It is constitutionally protected free speech. The First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution provides the most powerful written guar-
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Robert A. Denemark
antee of free expression in the world. Direct government censorship of Web content in the United States
was almost unknown. Some censorship attempts had
been made, however. For example, the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which Congress adopted to protect children from obscene, indecent, or offensive
messages, was struck down by the Supreme Court in
1997. Its 1998 version, the Child On-Line Protections
Act, was struck down in 2000. Even after the terrorist
attacks of 2001, Internet security extended mostly to
the removal of information from government agency
Web pages, along with massive surveillance.1 In the
United States, First Amendment rights guarantee a
good deal of openness, leaving regulation of the Web to
the Internet community itself (Privacy International
2003:129–30).
Even in the United States, however, not all speech
is protected. The rules that U.S. courts use to determine
the legality of expression are based on the idea that
some speech may directly incite illegal behavior, may
constitute hateful “fighting words,” or may be pornographic. These types of expression are not protected.
Just prior to the French court’s initial decision on Yahoo
auctions, a U.S. federal district court ruled against an
anti-abortion Web site (called the Nuremberg Files)
that provided lists of doctors performing abortions,
along with their home addresses and license plate numbers. A red line was placed through the name of each
physician on the list who was killed, as it was with the
name of Dr. Barnett Slepian, who was killed in October
1998. His killer, an anti-abortion activist, used a highpowered rifle to shoot the doctor in the back while he
was in his kitchen with his family. A jury determined
that the site that published his name and address was
intending to incite violence and was therefore not a
form of protected expression (Gurak 2001:55). Would
the availability of Nazi memorabilia serve the same role
in France that the anti-abortion hit list served in the
United States?2
Not all countries with a history of free expression
agree on what merits protection. U.S. Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel, who had to handle parts of the Yahoo case
1. In 2003, the Supreme Court allowed some filtering on
public school and library computers used by minors, but the
safeguards had to be deactivated for adults.
2. A higher court eventually overturned this verdict,
though not until after the French court made its final ruling in
the Yahoo case.
when it emerged in the U.S. courts, acknowledged that
“many nations, including France, limit freedom of
expression on the Internet based upon their respective
legal, cultural or political standards” (BBC 2001: June
9). At about this time, the Dutch government began a
long-term attempt to limit access to gambling sites emanating from outside Holland (van den Hoven 2000:129).
In 1998, Germany moved against Internet pornography. The former head of Germany’s CompuServe, Felix
Somm, received a two-year sentence (suspended) and
was ordered to pay a fine of $55,000 to charity when a
Bavarian count held that service providers were responsible for the contents of their offerings (Graham
1999:110). The Somm prosecution was consistent with
a law enacted in the United Kingdom in 1996 that treats
Internet service providers (ISPs) as “publishers” (Graham 1999: 116). This was a particularly chilling conclusion for Internet supporters. ISPs argued that just as
telephone companies were not liable for what was said
on the phone line, so only the creator of illegal or offensive material, and any eventual “user,” should be the
subject of legal action. ISPs, like the telephone companies that simply carry messages, should be left alone.
Somm was eventually cleared on appeal, but only by
arguing that he lacked the technical means to block the
offending sites. This ability did not exist outside CompuServe’s U.S. headquarters, and Somm showed that he
had fought with his U.S. bosses over this issue several
times (BBC 1999: November 17).
The question of legal jurisdiction remains open,
but is not as large a problem as might be thought. In his
2003 article, “Against Cyberanarchy,” Jack Goldsmith
argued that those who see cyberspace as a domain
beyond local law are still using “a nineteenth century
territorialist conception of how real space is regulated.”
He provided a series of examples of extraterritorial
jurisdiction, like the French were trying to impose on
Yahoo, from decades-old cases relevant to insurance,
antitrust, and merger activities. Goldsmith concluded
that “[I]n these situations, and countless others, one
jurisdiction regulates extraterritorial conduct in a way
that invariably affects individual behavior and regulatory efforts in other jurisdictions” (Goldsmith 2003:39–
40). Several essays published in 2000 by attorneys practicing in the area of information technology agreed.
One concluded: “Most Internet lawyers now believe
that if a web site conducts business with customers in a
particular country, there is a good chance that the oper-
Globalization: France, Nazis, and the Internet
ators of the web site will be subject to the laws of that
country” (Mawhood and Tysver 2000:123). Another
suggested: “Thus in theory at least, there is no legal vacuum in relations to criminal activities on-line”
(Edwards 2000:281). The real problem seems to be the
ability to enforce rules in another jurisdiction, especially if that enforcement is unwelcome (Goldsmith
2003). The French court’s finding, dangerous as it was
to freedom of expression in the United States and the
functioning of the Internet, seemed to rest on a solid
legal foundation.
Should Yahoo voluntarily comply with the French
ruling? Both specific business and industrywide issues
needed to be considered. Online auctions were only
about five years old in 2000, and their potential for
profit and growth was significant. The industry leader
was eBay, which increased its number of users from 2.2
million to 10 million in 1999 alone and reported sales of
US$2.8 billion in that year. Industry analysts predicted
that sales would continue to grow as online auctions
replaced “flea markets, public auctions, garage sales and
classified ads”—a $100 billion annual market. Auction
sales were widely expected to reach about US$6.4 billion by 2004 according to David Bunnell’s The eBay Phenomenon. Consumer groups reported that some thirtyfive million people in the United States alone had participated in auctions by the end of 2000 (National Consumers League News 2001). Yahoo management was not
blind to this significant potential.
On the other hand, there was a price to be paid by
auctioning goods of a questionable nature. Industry
pioneer eBay had suffered through some of the same
problems. Some goods are illegal in nearly every jurisdiction. There had to be some way to control auctions
of illegal drugs, stolen goods, or human organs (Bunnell
2000:139). Next came a series of goods that were of
questionable status. Powerful corporations were poised
to move against auctions (and their hosts) that featured
counterfeit copies of their software, music, or movies.
Racist Internet domain names, Nazi memorabilia, and
items related to serial killers had caused a serious
uproar. Groups, individuals, and corporations had all
complained, some quite publicly (Bunnell 2000: 138–
49). As a result, eBay had to develop a method to police
its own auctions. To avoid state regulation, the Internet
community would have to be self-regulating. And since
not everyone with items to offer could be trusted to use
7
good judgment, the auctioneers would have to exercise
some control.
Every company that deals with the general public
wishes to be viewed in a positive light. Yahoo had no
interest in being identified as a company where racist
goods were especially welcome, because “one or two
incidents blown up in the press can tarnish the entire
image of the company and its service. The press loves
these stories and moves them to page 1, even when no
one is damaged” (Bunnell 2000:140). Nor would the
fact that it was Yahoo in the United States, not France,
that was offering the offending goods be likely to help
salvage their reputation. Neither the public’s understanding, nor its tolerance for the legal technicalities of
transnational incorporation, would offer much protection. It would be easy for opponents to suggest that
Yahoo was supporting Nazism and hiding behind a legal
technicality. Yahoo of France could be painted as a cynical manipulator of the law, and a concerted campaign
might easily paint every outlet with the “Yahoo” name
as racist, regardless of where Yahoo filed its papers of
incorporation or paid its taxes. Yahoo’s positive image
was an important corporate asset and needed to be safeguarded.
But Yahoo could not simply comply with the
French court if it wished to protect its future business
prospects. If France could demand that Yahoo remove
auction items, could every court in every country
demand removal of other Web material? Philippe Guillanton, director general of Yahoo!France, argued that
“tomorrow a judge from any country could come to a
Web publisher from any other country and ask them to
pull down such and such because it’s unacceptable in
that country” and concluded, “The whole question
goes above Yahoo! The point is whether we want to
condemn the Internet to be closed in the same way that
the media have traditionally been closed by frontiers”
(Sammut 2000). Giving in at this point might condemn
the Internet to a level of control and regulation that
would destroy it. Imagine every country having the
right to censor every Web site regardless of where it