Quebec cyberzaps offenders

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by George Maddux

Mike Calomiris is a hell of a bon vivant: get on his Internet mailing list and he'll regularly send you photos of himself smiling among friends on Crescent. The provincial government, however, seems less charmed by his use of the Internet.

Calomiris had his 15 minutes of fame in 1999 after being fined for having a unilingual English Web site for his business, Laval-based Michaels Photography. A storm of publicity spread around the cyber world and everybody, including Calomiris, assumed that the government had backed off. But Calomiris was fined again last Friday. "I have no idea why [the Quebec government] is picking on me," he says. "They're just wasting people's time continuously instead of concentrating on building the economy."

Lawyer Brent Tyler plans to fight the fine for Calomiris. "The law that they're basing these prosecutions on was enacted when the Web wasn't even a gleam in anybody's eye," says Tyler. "The way the government is interpreting the law would make every Quebec-based Web site that didn't translate everything that isn't in French illegal. That's a huge percentage of commercial Web sites." Tyler says that the government is "scared shitless" of bringing any of the dozen companies he's defending on this charge to court. Meanwhile the government refuses to bother bigger companies like Pratt and Whitney and Bombardier which still haven't received francisization certifications. "The government doesn't go after the big guys," says Tyler. "They go after the small businesses that don't have the means to fight back."