ANALYSIS

French judge praised for Web juggling act

LONDON, Nov 21 (Reuters) - The French judge who this week restricted access to a Nazi artifacts Web site deserves praise for upholding both free flow of information on the Internet as well as his country's anti-racism laws, lawyers said on Tuesday. Critics who fear the Internet will be straightjacketed as a result should target instead stricter rulings in other European countries which have gone largely unnoticed, they added.

Those who want to prevent access to certain sites should worry about the clunky software solutions that are available.

Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez ordered on Monday that U.S.-based Internet portal Yahoo should set up filtering software to prevent a vast majority of French inhabitants access to a Web site which offered Nazi memorabilia.

The Web site, hosted on a server in the United States and aimed at U.S. citizens, must now be blocked from Internet users in France by using three filters -- two to establish the nationality and another using keywords such as "Nazi."

The verdict is also in line with an earlier European Court ruling which said in a related case a judge can only prohibit a publication in his own country, not in other member states.

VERDICT SHOWS THAT REAL WORLD IS NOT GOING AWAY

The Yahoo verdict firmly establishes that the Internet does not erase all boundaries, and real countries with their own laws are a fact of life, said Internet-specialist Joris van Manen at Netherlands-based law firm De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek.

"The criticism that the judge is setting a dangerous precedent for the Internet is not justified," he said. He pointed out that the judge had steered clear of asking Yahoo to remove the site from its servers in the United States.

An [unnamed] Internet and telecoms lawyer in Britain said the decision by the French judge "should be favoured."

The French ruling followed the principles of a recently accepted European Union electronic commerce directive which says that normal national taxes apply for goods and services sold over the Internet.

But Van Manen said earlier verdicts from other judges in Europe, which could do more harm to the Internet in the long run, had gone unnoticed.

In a dispute between a Belgian company Capital and Netherlands-based KPN Telecom, a judge ordered that the Belgian firm should make its copy of KPN Telecom's Dutch telephone directory inaccessible to Dutch Web surfers. Capital subsequently removed the information from its server.

"That verdict is a lot more radical than the Yahoo one," Van Manen said, adding that the site was taken down because of the uncompromising stance of the Dutch judge.

In practice, it is very hard to seal off part of a Web site for one group of users, said Internet software engineer Peter Tanis at Dutch consultancy QQQ.

"It's very complicated," he said.

The French judge realised this and ordered three filtering technologies that should deprive 95 percent of French citizens of access to the Nazi artifacts auction site.

But Yahoo France complained that the keyword filter would also prevent French Internet users access to Web sites with academic and otherwise harmless information on Nazis.

"We will also block off other sites, for instance ones that explain the Shoah," said Yahoo spokeswoman Nathalie Dray, using the Hebrew word for the fire from hell, which refers to the Holocaust.

A more sophisticated solution to combine keywords with the exact address of the Web site would be easy to circumvent, because it would be simple to relocate the Web site, Tanis said.

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