Web 2.0 ain't so hot in France

I just got back from a 2 week trip in France. I had in mind to video-interview Founders of Web 2.0 startups while I was there. Unfortunately, things did not really go as planned.

The two first days in Paris went alright. I got to meet and video-interview Antony Zanetti from Click2Map. We did the video-interview on a Parisian cafe terrasse at Porte de La Villette. The traffic noise is hell in this neighborhood, but talking with Antony and his colleague Benoit was sweet.

Right after that, I metroed my way over to the BNP Paribas HQ on the Champs-Elysees (or nearby) to meet Jean-Michel Billaut, a famous French tech blogger. The purpose of my visit was to get some contacts of Web 2.0 startup Founders to make more French interviews. He gave me a few, did a video-interview of me (bizarro world), and told me about his plan to develop a 100 Mgb per inhabitants Internet infrastructure in France.

The day after, I left Paris to visit family in Toulouse. Downtown Toulouse doesn't have a single wifi connection. You have to go to the suburbs of the town to find one. Only my aunt had a 56K connection accessible through an old version of IE. Train stations' wifi networks do not work. In Nice, it was almost the same story. I tried to convince my cousin who is a photographer to post some of his work on Flickr, but he doesn't really see the benefits of it.

On the Toulouse-Nice train trip, I talked with a famous telco lobbyist at the European Commission. He confirmed to me that France was not going to be wired the way Jean-Michel Billaut foresees it for a long time. The problem in France is Orange-SFR-Bouygues who hold a monopoly on the market and control Web services. For politico-economical reasons, Web 2.0 in France will remain a niche for a long time.

This leads me to think: If the Web 2.0 is so underdeveloped in countries where the Internet is supposedly everywhere (like France), just how big is the Web 2.0 bubble in the Silicon Valley? I meet Web entrepreneurs on a daily basis. They all say they have gold in their hands. When I'm here in the Valley, i can see it shine. As soon as I leave this place, the gold turns into grey rocks. Confusing...