This is just protectionism at its finest. You better don’t think that would happen if FB was a french company. The industrial-governmental-complex is stronger in France than anywhere else in the western world.
CNBC compiled a lost of fines handed out by the EU and some of the largest ones concern companies from the EU:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/27/the-largest-fines-dished-out...
Part of the reason you will mostly hear of companies outside France running afoul of the rules, is that companies that is incorporated outside French jurisdiction is generally out of reach of French authority, and they try get away with ignoring them.
In the case with Facebook described in the article, Facebook refuse to even provide samples of what data they send, stating that they consider themselves not bound by French law and EU rules, but only by US rules.
French companies are more unlikely to get into that situation in the first hand, as if they would break data protection laws and ignore legal requests for information, the police could (potentially) walk in one day, only to walk out with all your storage arrays.
Given the history of Europe, it's almost certainly not all about protectionism, and part of it might also be about a different kind of protectionism then economic.
As the US election seems to show, availability of mass amounts of personal information can be a threath to democratic process itself, and Europe has seen information turned into weapons of population control long before internet was a thing, and the democracy we have is at the cost of tremendous amounts of blood and death.
Sure, having the information only available within a country doesn't negate the risk for that country, but it helps reduce it for all other. Privacy laws help ensure democratic processed is not as easily hijacked by either foreign states, or multinationals.
(Are you counting protectionist immigration laws as part of countries' industrial-governmental complexes?)
I'd say both are protectionist and both are wrong. My interpretation of your parent was simply that it is protectionist of France to be doing this (and I'd argue that makes it as wrong as the American protectionism that you brought up).
US tech companies (and in many cases the US government) have been operating as if the national laws of the rest of the world are sub-ordinate to theirs, or just in the way. Succesive UK governments have turned a blind eye due to the Special Relationship. However things are starting to catch up in the EU. There has been a distinct change in opinion towards the US in Europe I have detected. Bush jnr made the US look sub-intellectual, Obama made it seem inward-looking. I don't know anyone in Europe who thinks Trump is anything more than a deeply cynical character. People don't see the US as the land of opportunity and commerce anymore. They see it as self-serving and insular.
Great empires all come to an end. It takes time, but this one is in decline.
FB wouldn’t have grown (that way) in France in the first place.
Also, I don't agree with the protectionism part. We (unfortunately) don't even have the beginning of a french competitor to facebook or whatsapp, even in the whole Europe. So asking whatsapp to comply can not possibly be seen as a way to favor the local brands. In that sense, it's completely different from what China is doing in the field.
Edit: ironicaly, the fact that FB doesn't pay any tax in France also makes our government 100% free of all pressure :D
After watching that recent video by TechAltar where he speaks about the EU not having a lot of tech companies, I was feeling a bit low. But your point actually makes sense, and makes me think that perhaps it's for the best since the EU will actually have the political means to reign in big tech. companies - basically the big oil of this age.
Let’s be honest, Facebook would have never had a chance as a French company.