[gerty]

French National Assembly has 577 delegates. According to Le Monde article, 25 voted for and 5 against. The rest, I suppose, didn't care to show up. This is beyond WTF.

I am a client at OVH and Gandi and I hope they send a big FU to the French government and relocate. I am willing to pay a premium for that.

[dagw]

The rest, I suppose, didn't care to show up.

I'm assuming it's largely strategic. "Everybody" wanted to pass the bill, but no one wanted it on their voting record since they knew it was controversial. So everybody got together and selected a small number of martyrs to go sully themselves while everybody else could keep their hands clean.

[cm2187]

In all fairness no one really watches voting records in France like people do in the US. Most of the time most French MP don't bother showing up, even for important votes. Particularly if they are late at night.

[ddoolin]

Why would they want it to pass? What benefit are they reaping from such a thing?

[pfortuny]

It is a law against TERROR: you cannot oppose it!

[LLWM]

Or the simpler explanation is true - most of them didn't bother to vote because they don't give a shit.

[talideon]

By dodging the vote, they effectively voted for it. Cowards.

[walterbell]

Does that make it easier to reverse later?

[zz1]

They announced that they are going to relocate, indeed: https://eu.ovh.com/fr/news/articles/a1743.le-gouvernement-ve...

And launched a big initiative to federate tech actors against the bill: http://ni-pigeons-ni-espions.fr/

######## Breaking ########

Octave Klaba finally declares that the bill doesn't compromise the trust chain. https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/588666965755092993

[juliendorra]

They are not really saying they will relocate, and obviously OVH invested dozens, maybe hundreds, of millions in new data centers and fibers. Their business is based on real locations, in real buildings and you can't change that easily. They are saying that it will most likely alter their growth and ability to attracts new customers. They may freeze new data center projects in France, but even that might be unlikely as they have a massive customer base in France.

Of course OVH already have several data centers outside of France, in Canada for example.

That doesn't help us french people, as our traffic will be inspected from where ever it is coming and going, as long as it originate here.

[zz1]

They are indeed, and Octave told they are chaning their business plan.

[gerty]

OVH seems to be turning back on their threats. In his Twitter, Octave Klaba modestly announced that everything is OK now after an amendment 437 was added.

This is largely disputed: http://www.numerama.com/magazine/32806-boites-noires-le-gouv...

Black boxes are still there. Some light safeguards are added, notably approval of Prime Minister, but it still remains quite vague.

[cm2187]

It is hard to take their threat seriously. It must be horribly expensive to move a huge datacentre without disrupting the service. The most they could have done is to move their headquarters, which wouldn't protect them from this law, and make all their growth outside of France, which is what pretty much all major French corporations do already anyway.

[Joona]

Did they release an English translation of that?

(Google Translate link: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3... )

[zz1]

Not that I am aware of.

[pmontra]

They have two data centers in France and one in Canada. Canada is too many ms away so I probably have to relocate my services to another company. Too bad because the price was good even if customer service is abysmal (for VPSes). Anybody here knows about another company selling VPSes with similar prices and features? Thanks.

[mhandley]

From machine translation of his tweets, he seems to be saying that an amendment (#437) was added last night, before the bill was passed, that makes things not so bad for datacenters. Can anyone with better French than me say what the amendment was?

[zz1]

The amendment is, as Tristan Nitot said, "A lot of promises, very few facts". And even after saying that the amendment improves the situation, Octave still says that the law is bad:

https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/588670226138583040

[mercurial]

You know exactly how much you can trust the promises of politicians in general and the current administration in particular...

[Mimu]

Rofl they surrender quickly.

[infinity0]

How the fuck does 25/577 make quorum? Do they not have this concept?

[espadrine]

There always was an issue of people being absent at the Assembly, so that concept was hard to enforce.

It is usually not that bad, though. I think the low number is due to allegiance to a party. Socialists felt like they had to vote in agreement to their party leaders to advance their careers, but to avoid backslash from the press and the public, many didn't show up. Their opposition, the right wing, always was big on tighter consumer control and surveillance. The previous president famously had speeches where he described his ambition to wash out undesirables with Kärcher, and he made some waves during his mandate as Minister of the Interior when he talked about his intention to track immigrants. Since he is still considered important in their party, I suppose many had the same dilemma and didn't come.

[higherpurpose]

That's unacceptable. In most other countries if a certain number of members is not reached, then you can't vote on the law. What kind of democracy is that where only 5% of the representatives vote on a certain law?

Does France have a Constitutional Court at least?

[pikzen]

We have a Consitutional Council, and they're somewhat useful. They censored the "graduated riposte" part of the HADOPI law a few years back.

We do not have a Constitutional Court. The Fifth Republic was explicitly created to give more power to the government and as such abstained from creating such courts.

[vog]

> What kind of democracy is that where only 5% of the representatives vote on a certain law

I'm not familar with France, but whenever that happens in Germany, they ensure that the correct proportions (regardingthe parties/fractions) are maintained.

[mercurial]

> Since he is still considered important in their party

He is, in fact, the current head of the main conservative party, and will no doubt be presidential candidate in 2017.

> I suppose many had the same dilemma and didn't come.

I suspect the dilemma was more about avoiding to support the current majority too openly. As you said, nobody will mistake the UMP for a bastion of privacy and individual freedoms.

[d0vs]

Nope, it was the same thing with Hadopi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law

[espadrine]

I believe this still has to be approved by the Senate, right?

I'd expect that law to be distorted into a weird red tape system with virtually no power, but that will still get passed just so the politicians can say they have passed some law.

> In response, the government proposed a few hours before the vote a new amendment supposed to appease the hosting providers. If adopted, it lets them to define the separation between "metadata and content."

I'd expect most providers would say that they don't have any metadata, and that they would designate /dev/null as their black box.

[mercurial]

> I'd expect that law to be distorted into a weird red tape system with virtually no power, but that will still get passed just so the politicians can say they have passed some law.

I doubt it. They already have a well-oiled surveillance machine, they do not want to make it harder to operate while legalizing it. I do not expect the senate to alter the law significantly.

[maccard]

I've never understood this - why is it allowed that they don't show up for these votes? (Not just in france)

[adsche]

In Germany, ususally bills are discussed by smaller subsets of the parliament in committees.

Parties then decide on a party line for the vote.

Thus, most often the result would not be different if everybody was there.

Edit: Also, because of limited time, commitee meetings may actually be held while there are votes. So it does make sense.

NB: The German parliament however can technically not decide anything if not enough members are present. However, usually attendees are not counted. Parties can demand a named vote though, which is counted. One party demanded that once, and it was almost universially called 'unfair' [1]. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] (in German) http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/posse-um-hammelspr...

[seszett]

People do not have to have an opinion on everything, do they?

It doesn't really work that way today, but in an ideal world I would find it good that the 30 people who understand computers vote while the 337 others abstain.

Also, I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but in France deputies usually have another job, you can't expect them to go to Paris on every wednesday to vote on things they don't even really know about.

[harshreality]

It might also be 30 people who know nothing about computers but have an agenda.

The way to get informed votes on technical laws is to carefully and transparently construct councils or committees whose members are technically competent. Give those councils the power to vote on technical laws, binding the main legislature to the result of such votes.

You can't have a voting body without a quorum rule and say it's to allow the subset of the representatives who understand the subject matter to vote. That's unenforceable and will be abused for political purposes far more often than it's used because the few representatives voting are the ones who genuinely understand the proposed law.

Quorum rules are critical for basic sanity in operation of a governmental body charged with voting.

It's a pathetic excuse that they have other jobs, and they can't show up most of the time. A few U.S. States had that sentiment, and what they do is have the legislature meet only a few months every year or two.

There's no reason they couldn't have an online voting system for representatives, either. The intelligence agencies of France and FVEY can't skew the votes by breaking the cryptosystem used for online voting if the voting record is published and the representatives verify that their votes were counted correctly. One barrier to doing this is probably that on some issues, representatives don't want their votes recorded; they want voice votes. (I'm guessing France does that most of the time; the U.S. certainly does.)

[seszett]

> A few U.S. States had that sentiment, and what they do is have the legislature meet only a few months every year or two.

That might work in a US state that only has a few million inhabitants, but I can't see how an entire country could work this way.

As for the rest, I think you are very much assuming that your legislation system is the one and only way to go, even though looking at it from faraway it's not entirely obvious that it works better than the system we have, which seems to lack basic sanity, uses unenforceable principles and will be abused more often than it's used according to you.

I honestly think quorum rules have no positive impact on democracy, at worst allowing minorities to obstruct legislation by simply not showing up, and at best making clueless members or parliament show up just to vote what they were told to.

[chinathrow]

My take is that they won't relocate due to customers needing very low latency to the french eyeball providers.

[worklogin]

Does the French legislature not have Quorum requirements? That seems like a poor design.