France's Silicon Valley Wants Some Respect

Jacques-Antoine Granjon, the long-haired founder of Paris’s vente-privee.com, is not happy with France’s presidential candidates. “The Web is a gold mine for jobs,” says Granjon, the 49-year-old creator of Europe’s biggest online discount retailer. “But politicians just don’t get it.”

With the jobless rate at a 12-year high, the candidates are making cutting unemployment a top priority. But they haven’t said much about encouraging the creation of the next Facebook or Google in France. France’s Internet entrepreneurs have already made a decent contribution to the economy, according to a study by consultant McKinsey. The report says the French Internet sector contributed €72 billion ($94 billion) to France’s gross domestic product in 2010. That’s 3.7 percent of GDP. Internet businesses created 700,000 jobs from 1995 to 2010.