France is quite openly waging war against American internet giants in particular because of their practice of avoiding paying taxes on income they earn in the country. At the beginning of the year Google had to pay 60 million euros to the state foundation for the French media that is designed to increase their presence on the Internet. The alternative was the legislation that would sought directly from Google to pay the media whose content is transmitted on the Internet as part of their search engine results.

Investigation about the tax evasion by Google has also been conducted since they do the financial calculation in their European headquarters in Ireland, where taxes are lower, and not where they really made profit.

[Ed - France could also be asking EU regulators to look more deeply into the way Apple does business in the EU. We are not sure how far the request will get, but we have a feeling that Apple will have a harder time in France for a little while.]

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