French president Jacques Chirac yesterday pledged to help fund a new European internet search engine to rival Google and Yahoo as he railed against what he sees as the threat of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism.In a speech in Reims, Mr Chirac said: "We're engaged in a global competition for technological supremacy. In France, in Europe, it's our power that's at stake." Mr Chirac's intention is to provide forgivable loans to a Franco-German "multimedia search engine for the internet" being developed by French group Thomson and Deutsche Telekom. The plans reflect Mr Chirac's often-expressed concern about the omnipresence of US culture in French society. The government is already pushing to create an online digital library to rival one planned by Google. Dubbed "Project Quaero", from the Latin word meaning "to seek", the programme will be fleshed out in more detail next month. Serge Travert, who is leading the project for Thomson, admitted the new search engine was developed "in part" to combat the dominance of US companies in the internet arena. He said the new service would not be built from scratch, but would build on "science and technology that already exists in France and Germany". Much of the content is expected to be European. "Culture is not merchandise and it cannot be left to the blind forces of the market," Mr Chirac said in a speech earlier this year giving the go-ahead for work to begin on a digital library of European literature. "We must staunchly defend the world's diversity of cultures against the looming threat of uniformity."
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