The French President, aka Mr Bruni 2008, wants to suppress all forms of advertising from the national public TV network, à la BBC, to increase the quality of its programming by avoiding frontal competition with private competitors TF1 and M6. I say “Bravo Nicolas!”

But that’s it for the good news. To finance the “unprecedented” cultural revolution, he offers to tax advertising revenues of private broadcasters (fine), but also the revenues of new means of communication like Internet access or mobile telephony, penalizing “relatively new and still-developing economic and communications tools” to support traditional television that draws fewer and fewer viewers. What’s next? A tax on blank CDs, DVDs and media storage like the iPods to support the struggling music industry? Oh wait, I forgot, they have it already.