“Amazon arrogates to itself the power to interpret the law for its own benefit and to trample underfoot the law passed by the sovereign Parliament”

OWe hear a lot about economic, food, health and ecological sovereignty. There is an area that is too rarely mentioned, and yet dangerously threatened today: that of culture, and particularly books. We are lucky to live in a country with the densest network of bookstores in the world. This is proof of the relevance and effectiveness of the Lang law of 1981, which guarantees the same price for books, on the Internet as in bookstores, in a large metropolis as in the most remote village.

This regulation aims to ensure the equality of citizens in relation to books, the maintenance of a very dense distribution network and support for pluralism in creation and publishing. It is the sustainability of this virtuous law that is truly in question today. Indeed, the balance found by the law on the single price, repeatedly copied from our European neighbors, was undermined at the start of the 2000s by the emergence on the market of extra-European digital giants who used the book as a flagship product to capture market share, and offered a terribly attractive customer promise, but economically expensive, ecologically disastrous and, above all, impossible to duplicate for smaller players.

Twice, the legislator attempted to correct the growing distortion of competition between physical booksellers and online sellers, between small players and behemoths, that this dumping policy generated. First in 2014, with the ban on free home shipping of books. Failure. Amazon rushed, while the ink on the law was not yet dry, to set its delivery costs at 1 euro cent…

Naturally, the practice of the digital market leader immediately and very effectively emptied the law of its substance. Seven years later, the legislator learned the lessons of this setback and, this time, decided to combine the ban on free shipping of books with a pricing scale of minimum fees corresponding to the rate in force for the majority other products, by providing an exemption for orders collected from book retail stores, with the aim of supporting the latter for the role they play in our territories.

An almighty giant

Amazon virulently fought the Darcos law of December 30, 2021, an adjustment to the Lang law which, despite everything, had been adopted unanimously by both Chambers, after a vast public debate. Without even waiting for the fate of its own legal actions against this Darcos law which it is obviously entitled to contest, Amazon today arrogates to itself the power to interpret the law for its own benefit and to trample underfoot the law passed. by the sovereign Parliament.

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