Ambition numérique

The report belongs to the Council’s plenary body, not to me: I coordinated the consultation and the drafting process as secretary general. This distinction is not a formality: it explains the nature of the document, a negotiated synthesis among 30 members, not an authored thesis.

The innovation lay less in the content than in the method. Nearly 15,000 contributions were gathered in 2015 through an open consultation, on a public-policy subject with no identity-politics dimension: the exercise was unprecedented in France, and it has not been repeated at that scale since. Later online consultations have generally served to legitimise texts already written rather than to produce their content. This regression deserves to be noted, and it does not reflect well on us: a method that cannot be institutionalised remains a performance, not an achievement.

The loi pour une République numérique (France’s law for a digital republic) of 7 October 2016 drew substantially on the report’s first strand. Three of its flagship provisions correspond to it directly: net neutrality, written into French law at articles 40 to 47; the right to data portability, at article 48; and the duty of loyalty imposed on online platforms, at articles 49 to 53, together with a legal definition of the platform. The second strand, on public action, resurfaces in the default openness of public data, in the communicability of the administration’s source code under the 1978 loi (France’s freedom-of-information act), and in the obligation on public-service concessionaires to hand over their data. The fourth strand produced the right to keep an internet connection during a payment default.

One provision deserves to be singled out for how far ahead of its time it was. The law created a right of access to the rules defining the algorithmic processing used by public administrations whenever it underpins individual decisions. That was in 2016, two years before the Villani report called for a public function to audit algorithms, which never came into being, and eight years before the EU AI Act imposed evaluation obligations of its own. On this particular point, French law got there before anyone else, and no one remembers it.

This finding actually reverses the pattern one thinks one recognises across this library. On platform loyalty, the national level did not act too late but too early: France legislated in 2016, the European Union in 2022 with the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, six years later and with a force of an altogether different order. The French text’s transparency obligations were absorbed and then superseded. The fault was not aiming at the wrong level, but wielding an instrument too weak for an object too large.

A necessary honesty, all the same: the bill’s explanatory memorandum cites the 2014 annual study of the Conseil d’État (France’s highest administrative court) on digital technology and fundamental rights, not this report. The consultation was one input among several feeding a text whose draft bill was already written on the day the report was submitted.

Two recommendations never went anywhere, and they resemble each other. Giving priority to free and open-source software in public procurement was scaled back to a mere statement of encouragement. And the creation of a rating agency for digital players, tasked with publicly assessing platform practices with the support of an open network of contributors, never came into being, for lack of a sponsor and probably of a legal basis. The problem it targeted, the information asymmetry between platforms and everyone else, is addressed today by the audit and transparency obligations of the Digital Services Act. The diagnosis was right; the instrument was not.

The same gap between a sound diagnosis and the wrong level of action recurs in the 2014 opinion on platform neutrality: national, when the subject had already stopped being one.

On video

The Conseil national du numérique had summed up the report in five minutes, at the time of its publication.

"Digital affects us all!", a five-minute presentation of the Ambition numérique report, Conseil national du numérique (in French).