Paul from Paris

European Consumer Day 2010 fell on March 15. Did you notice?

The EESC –that’s the European Economic and Social Committee, “a bridge between Europe and organised civil society”– marked the day with an event, held in Madrid, on enforcement of consumers’ rights.

A few days later, in Brussels, the European Union hosted a two-day European Consumer Summit.

This week, the European Commission released the third edition of the Consumer Markets Scoreboard, which benchmarks and tracks national consumer behaviors and the realization of the common market.

As reported in yesterday’s Financial Times, the European Commission has decided to reconsider an initiative to make it easier for consumers to claim damages for losses suffered from anti-competitive conduct. The initiative will not become law any time soon; the Commission will instead renew consultations with stakeholders.

John Dalli, the freshly seated European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy from Malta, duly notes consumer frustration with retail banking, electric utilities, and rental cars. For good order’s sake, Dalli also talks about “urban transport” and “green energy”. At the top of Dalli’s agenda is something he calls “Web 3.0″, which seems to be crossborder sales done over the Internet.

All of this matters to consumers, but none of it is compelling. Mr. Dalli lacks conviction, political will, or legislative ambition today. An advocate for neither consumers nor business, the Commissioner seems content to preside over a formidable institutional machine left to idle. The lost opportunity is colossal.

The A1 freeway runs from Paris to Lille (and passes by the CDG airport). Sometimes congestion brings traffic to a standstill.

That’s when the highwaymen strike. They operate in pairs: one breaks a window, usually the passenger window; the other grabs whatever is sitting on the passenger seat. The highwaymen favor cars driven by single women, who often leave a bag on the passenger seat.

In February, bandits attacked a vehicle carrying the daughter of the mayor of Kiev. They took off with a bag allegedly containing 4.5 million euros worth of jewelry.

Many victims are too stunned even to realize what is happening until the theft is over. Being stuck in traffic limits what a motorist can do. A few, however, have run after the robbers, pursuing them into nearby woods.

François, an unemployed 23-year-old, lives with his parents in Auvergne and spends lots of time on the Internet.

François searched the web for information on some employees of Twitter, in order to be able to guess answers to “secret questions” asked if a user forgets a password.

According to Adeline Champagnat of the French central office against online fraud (French acronym, O.C.L.C.T.I.C.), “he found the passwords of Twitter administrator accounts that would have let him then access access other accounts. He could have practically taken control of Twitter. Il could have, for example, deleted an account.”

As it happens, François seems to be a trespasser, not a burglar: he acknowledges accessing the administrator accounts but took only screen shots, in order to have bragging rights, under screen name “Hacker Croll”, to his exploits. Francois didn’t take control of Twitter, access other accounts, or delete anything.

François was apprehended last week and, after a day’s detention, charged with illegal access to a computer system. He will stand trial on June 24 in Clermont-Ferrant. If convicted, François could be imprisoned for up to two years and fined up to 30 000 euros.

This case makes me uneasy, for two reasons.

First, law enforcement seems to have grabbed the lowest-hanging fruit on the tree. Acting alone, in a hit-or-miss way, a late-blooming adolescent trespassed on Twitter, without injury to person, property, or data. Certainly there are cases more dire that investigators could pursue.

Second, the media failed to ask questions about François and showed no real knowledge of Twitter. The online service was invariably described as “the network used by Barack Obama and Britney Spears”, illustrated by stock footage of the President and the performer. Most reporters seemed to struggle with the technical aspects of the case and to view computers and the Internet as necessarily aggravating factors.

I have a daughter in elementary school, a French school in Paris, the city that I call home.

My daughter and her schoolmates read books, then write book reports on the books they have read. They started doing this at the beginning of the school year, and read several books throughout the school year (and during school vacations).

Everyone in my daughter’s class –the fifth grade– writes their book report in French. The books they read are all in French. But the books they read are translations, books originally written in a language other than French.

“All the books are translations?” I asked my daughter, doubtfully. She assured me that this was so. Most students read books originally written in English (or in “American”: French translators distinguish the two). Occasionally a student reads a book originally written in a more exotic language, such as Russian.

I solicited my daughter’s support to monitor her class’ reading habits. Surely, I thought, they’ll get around to reading books in French, originally written in French.

Six months later, my daughter’s assessment remains unchanged: all the students, without exception, have read books translated into French from another language.

My daughter is partial to an English series about young spies. Her classmates seem to have diverse and wide-ranging tastes. The class is not under the sway of any particular author or genre.

There are plenty of publishes in France that offer “senior child” or young adult titles. There is also, in France, a generations-old program to subsidize publications for youth. Of course, there are French authors who write for younger readers.

Why does this supply not encounter greater demand? Why do French consumers, when offered a choice, choose foreign over French writers? I have two hypotheses:

• First, foreign writers have already proven their success in a home market. Put differently, French publishers (only) translate titles that have sold (well) elsewhere. A kind of natural selection pits proven foreign writers against a broader range of French writers. This might explain a bias or skew towards writers translated into French, but not why young people would read only these writers.
• Second, foreign authors write in ways that French authors don’t. I don’t know whether literary critics have looked into this –how writers for young people write– but I think it’s a promising avenue for research. Although French writers write stories set in the past or in fantasy other-worlds, I find them thinly imagined, at least compared to English-language works. And French fiction in a realist vein tends, in my view, towards preachy and didactic works that unduly constrain their protagonists (and the imaginations of their readers).

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative party suffered huge losses to the left (socialist party and its allies, especially the greens) in last Sunday’s runoff elections for regional councils. Labor coalitions won in all but three regions (Alsace, Reunion Island, and French Guyana), in most cases by large margins. This is what I see:

• The result –the governing conservative party loses to labor– is almost exactly identical to the outcome the last time regional elections were held, in 2004, when the conservatives also were in power.
• If voters sent a disapproving message to the conservatives, that message expressed:
  • disappointment in the lack of change promised by Sarkozy as candidate, especially greater opportunities for the average person; under Sarkozy’s presidency, these people have stagnated or fallen behind, while the well-to-do have prospered;
  • worry about the future –especially the future solvency– of retirement funds, a sensitive point even for young people;
  • preoccupation with insecurity, whether economic (job loss) or physical (crime), which would explain why some conservative voters turned in these election to the far-right National Front and its anti-”immigrant” party line.
• Left-wing candidates –the incumbents– could campaign on their record and convince voters based on facts on the ground. In five regions, the conservative leader was a cabinet minister “parachuted” in from Paris; this top-down thinking might have put off voters. In other words, in regional elections French voters preferred leaders with strong regional connections.