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.
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.
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
(Google Translate link: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3... )
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does France have a Constitutional Court at least?
I'm not familar with France, but whenever that happens in Germany, they ensure that the correct proportions (regardingthe parties/fractions) are maintained.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.)
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.