The Constitutional Council did not come to the aid of Wish. The authority declared the website’s de-referencing device to be constitutional, which had been banned from the Web by the Ministry of the Economy after a report by the Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Law Enforcement. fraud (DGCCRF). A report that pointed to the dangerousness or non-compliance of certain products sold on the platform, and that the French administration had tried for several months to have them withdrawn from sale. For his part, Wish was walled in silence.
Some time later, the American company considered that it was still complying with the DGCCRF’s withdrawal requests and said it was perplexed by the administration’s excessive approach. She then seized the Council of State to try to invalidate the French decision, and reintegrate the suggestions of search engines as well as mobile application stores such as the App Store or the Google Play Store. Among his arguments, Wish also mentioned the “freedom of expression” and the “entrepreneurial freedom“.
“It thus pursued an objective of general interest“
But this Friday, October 21, the Constitutional Council was on the contrary as firm as in the initial decision. “The Constitutional Council rules that, in the first place, by adopting the contested provisions, the legislator intended to strengthen consumer protection and ensure the fairness of online commercial transactions“, said the authority in a press release. “It thus pursued an objective of general interest“.
The Council brushed aside Wish’s arguments, considering for example that the company has a certain ignorance of freedom of enterprise, and recalls that it is “it is open to the legislator to limit this freedom, which derives from Article 4 of the Declaration of 1789, from restrictions linked to constitutional requirements or justified by the general interest, on the condition that this does not result in any disproportionate harm to the objective pursued“.
The platform is not completely banned from the French Web, since it is still possible to access the site by typing the full url in your browser. For the moment…