PARIS — When the most prominent new face in France’s effort to oversee the new economy speaks, her pronouncements may be followed almost as closely in Silicon Valley and Seoul as in Paris.
Fleur Pellerin, a deputy finance minister, is the point woman in President François Hollande’s campaign to stimulate innovation. But in trying to put a French imprint on the digital economy, she has been drawn into a growing number of disputes with U.S. technology companies like Google, Twitter and Amazon.
In South Korea, it is Ms. Pellerin’s personal story that fascinates. Abandoned on the streets of Seoul as a newborn, she was taken in by a French family who raised her in the suburbs of Paris. While more than 150,000 South Korean children have been adopted by foreign parents since the Korean War, only one, Ms. Pellerin, has risen to the top ranks of the French government.
In one of the clearest signals yet from the French Finance Ministry that the government is intent on making the Internet conform to French law and custom, Ms. Pellerin last week waded into a dispute involving Google, whose advertising had been blocked by a French Internet service provider, Free.
The move was widely seen as an attempt by Free to force Google to pay for network access. As a preliminary step, Ms. Pellerin ordered Free to restore full service, but she made it clear that she thought the French company had a legitimate grievance.
The appointment of Ms. Pellerin last May, after Mr. Hollande’s election, prompted talk of a new orientation in French technology policy, where mistrust of foreign companies has sometimes been the guiding principle.
Ms. Pellerin, 39, is the first French government minister of Asian extraction. Although she has never visited the land of her birth, in French technology circles her rise fostered a perhaps naïve hope: Might Ms. Pellerin transform France into a European version of South Korea, where ultrahigh-speed broadband is ubiquitous and electronics giants like Samsung and LG have become world-beaters?
“I would like to make France one of the top nations in terms of digital innovation,” Ms. Pellerin said during a recent interview in her office at the Finance Ministry, which juts out over the Seine in eastern Paris like a giant, modern version of a medieval river toll barrier. “If we don’t act in the next few years it will be too late.”
Yet anyone expecting a drastic break with French governing traditions might be disappointed by Ms. Pellerin. After her unusual arrival in France, her upbringing and rise through the system were largely indistinguishable from that of many native-born members of the French administration.
Raised by middle-class parents — her father, who has a doctorate in nuclear physics, is a small-business owner — Ms. Pellerin grew up in two Paris suburbs, gritty Montreuil and wealthier Versailles. A promising student from the start, she was educated at elite institutions, including Sciences Po and the École Nationale d’Administration, which serve as finishing schools for the country’s ruling class. Before joining Mr. Hollande’s government, she was a magistrate at the Cour des Comptes, a body that audits the public finances, and worked in public relations.
Ms. Pellerin’s husband, Laurent Olléon, is also in government service, as an official in the office of Marylise Lebranchu, the minister for the reform of the state and decentralization. Ms. Pellerin has an 8-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.
In her new role in government, Ms. Pellerin has become the central figure in Mr. Hollande’s drive to establish “digital sovereignty” — the principle that French rules should apply to international Internet companies, which sometimes hover elusively beyond the reach of the national authorities. This has prompted clashes with a growing number of American technology companies.
Overseeing investigations of these companies on taxation and other matters, even while wooing them to invest in France, is a balancing act, Ms. Pellerin acknowledged.
“It’s not a crusade against Americans,” she said. “We are just trying to put everyone on a level playing field.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/technology/17iht-pellerin17.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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