What’s good enough for Orange…
Still, last year, France’s largest ISP, Orange (the brand name of France Telecom), managed to strike a deal (Google Translate) with Google that required Mountain View to compensate Orange for some of the traffic it was sending. For months now, Free has tried to put pressure on Google to get a similar deal by throttling YouTube traffic for Free users.
When that didn’t work, Free then implemented its ad block last week—which affected, according to BFM Business (Google Translate), all of Google’s ad servers. This halted ads alongside search, Gmail, and YouTube.
As a result, French online media groups were definitely not happy and the French government quickly got involved. The telecom regulatory agency, known as ARCEP, sent a letter to Free last week.
On Monday, France’s digital economy minister, Fleur Pellerin, held meetings with the heads of France’s ad agencies and online publishers to discuss the block. Pellerin also met one-on-one (Google Translate) with Maxime Lombardini, director-general of Illiad, Free’s parent company. In an interview with the French newspaper La Tribune, Pellerin demurred (Google Translate) on the underlying issue.
“Today there are real questions about the distribution of value among content providers, notably video—which consume a lot of bandwidth—and operators,” she said. “In the United States, paid confidential agreements have been signed with some operators. In France and in Europe, we must find ways of integrating more consensual [agreements] between Internet giants [with] national ecosystems. Free’s initiative clearly highlights the immediate importance of this issue.”