Clock reset in French Yahoo Nazi sales battle

1:00 PM

PARIS - A Paris judge stopped the clock in a ground-breaking battle over who rules the Internet by ordering an inquiry into U.S. web giant Yahoo's claim that it cannot bar French web users from on-line Nazi memorabilia sales.

Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez on Friday stuck by an emergency ruling he issued in May in which he asked Yahoo Inc to block French web surfers from English-language web sites where items like Nazi daggers or uniforms and SS badges are sold by auction in their hundreds every day.

But he decided against acting on anti-racist groups' demands for hefty fines on Yahoo for failing to comply with his initial emergency ruling in mid-May, opting instead to seek more time and advice.

Gomez said a three-man team would be have two months to work on the technical hurdles of applying such a blackout, including French expert Francois Wallon, and two other independent experts from the United States and Europe, who have yet to be picked.

He rejected Yahoo's argument that French courts did not have the power to impose French law -- which prohibits exhibit or sale of objects that incite racial hatred -- when French people tapped into Yahoo's English-language portal Yahoo.com.

A new hearing was set for November 6.

The French Movement against Racism (MRAP), which has also called for a boycott of Yahoo, has since joined the other two in claiming the U.S. giant has to make sure French law is respected even when French people tap into U.S. Web sites.

The French-language portal Yahoo.fr does not carry such auctions, but a web-wise person can easily click onto the U.S. sister site and find all kinds of Nazi and neo-Nazi material up for auction, which is allowed by U.S. freedom of speech law.

All three plaintiffs said they would fight on to make sure their arguments were confirmed by the French courts after the expert panel had done its work, arguing that U.S. law stopped at American borders, even in the virtual world of Internet.


"The decision to appoint international experts is a good decision...we will cooperate with the experts in order to find, to see, if any solution is possible," lawyer Christophe Pecnard said.

Yahoo France's managing director, Philippe Guillanton, went further, saying the technical problems of cutting out one type of surfer was only one issue. The bigger question was whether the Internet should be forced back behind the borders of each country -- with the French looking at French sites only and Americans sticking to their own virtual turf and likewise all over the world.

"This would be a major setback for Internet and the progress it has brought to people," he told Reuters in an interview. "It would be disastrous for the development of the Internet to try to limit it to national frontiers."

The case poses serious questions over who controls the break-neck expansion of leisure and business activity through a global network of computers, in this case when France bans sales of goods with racist overtones but the U.S. does not.

Yahoo says it is technically impossible to ring-fence French Internet users from Web sites governed by less restrictive U.S. laws, although Guillanton acknowledged that four companies had offered possible solutions, including New York firm Info Split and Montreal-based Internet security group Border Control.

But Guillanton said the Canadian firm had offered its expertise on the grounds that the Internet needed to be brought down to size in terms of its free-roaming, frontier-breaking reach and that this was not what Yahoo was fighting for.