Some scams have the merit of honesty. They make no claim to be anything other than what they are. And then there are these — the worst kind — which arrive dressed up as public services, stamped with a .gouv.fr domain, and sell you, with all the audacity of the Republic, a sticker for a thousand euros.
FranceNum. Root domain: finances.gouv.fr. The Ministry of the Economy, no less. When the State lends its authority to an initiative, it commits something: the trust that citizens and professionals have delegated to it since 1789. That is not a renewable resource, and every misuse erodes it a little further. After enough wear, people start to see through it.
The mechanism is of a sordid elegance.
A private company — selected according to criteria that nobody bothered to publish, through a process that owes more to personal networks than to any transparent tendering procedure — is entrusted with the sovereign right to affix a label onto businesses. A label that, in the recipient's mind, carries the seal of the State.
The assessment framework? Proprietary. Left to the auditor's discretion. What the certification industry would normally call a structural conflict of interest is referred to here as a "partnership."
The guarantees? Self-declared. You read that correctly. You are asked to pay between 800 and 1,000 euros to obtain, after an "audit" whose criteria nobody can verify, a badge whose value depends entirely on the reputation of the entity issuing it — an entity whose reputation, precisely, did not exist before it was awarded this contract.
This is the virtuous circle of the certification startup: they sell you the credibility they do not yet have, using the money you advance so they can acquire it. A business model that consumes trust and returns stickers.
The crowning irony, the cherry on top of the administrative mille-feuille, is the storefront of this virtuous operator of France's digital transformation. A website hosted on Wix — registered office: Tel Aviv. DNS infrastructure and domain managed via IONOS — registered office: Berlin.
Let us be clear: there is nothing inherently wrong with using foreign tools. But when you position yourself as the arbiter of the digital quality of French businesses, when you will tomorrow be auditing IT services companies, web agencies, and developers on their practices, their ethics, their technological sovereignty — it would be decent, at a minimum, not to be running your homepage on the servers of an Israeli freemium website builder.
The dissonance is so glaring that it becomes almost comical. Almost.
What this affair reveals goes beyond the individual case — and the news of this 13th of May 2026 illustrates it with near-perfect cruelty.
While FranceNum commissions a private operator hosted on Wix to audit the digital maturity of French businesses, the ANTS portal (national identity cards, passports, driving licences, vehicle registrations) was brought to its knees in April by an IDOR vulnerability, one of the most elementary in the catalogue: all it took was changing a single digit in a URL to access another user's account. The result: 11.7 million accounts officially compromised, with figures as high as 19 million being cited on cybercriminal forums.
The vulnerability was, in the words of the attacker himself, "really stupid." A qualifier worth pondering by anyone preparing to hand out digital quality medals.
And what does the Prime Minister do in the face of the disaster? According to Le Canard enchaîné, Sébastien Lecornu has decided to sideline ANSSI, the agency he holds partly responsible for failing to secure the State's sensitive websites. An institutional purge. Meanwhile, the victims wait.
Here, then, is the full picture: the State is incapable of securing its own portals against a 15-year-old armed with a script, yet through a .gouv.fr domain it commissions a private company to certify the digital quality of others. The coherence is striking.
The French State has a structural problem with delegating its sovereign functions to unregulated private intermediaries. FranceNum is not an isolated case: it is a symptom of a well-established administrative pathology — institutional label-washing — in which designating an operator is confused with building a standard.
A label without a public framework, without an independent accredited body, without an appeals procedure, without adversarial auditing — that is not a label. It is an entry fee to a club. And a club backed by a .gouv.fr domain is precisely what lawyers call, in the most serious cases, a misrepresentation of the nature of the service.
The ultimate paradox is institutional, and it is playing out today.
This 13th of May 2026, Acteurs publics reveals that Sébastien Lecornu has just appointed the prefigurators of two new structures intended to rebuild the State's digital architecture. Walter Arnaud, a general engineer of armament, is tasked with transforming Dinum into a National Authority for Digital Affairs and Artificial Intelligence of the State, with the ambition of achieving, within ten years, a unified interministerial digital foundation and reducing dependencies on non-European players.
The ambition is commendable. The words are well chosen. But while Matignon lines up its prefigurators and redraws its organisational charts at the top, one floor below, finances.gouv.fr is sending commercial emails directing professionals towards a sales funnel managed by a company whose website runs on servers in Tel Aviv.
The right hand is building a doctrine of digital sovereignty. The left hand is financing, via the State's stamp of approval, a privatised label hosted outside France. This is not incoherence. It is administrative schizophrenia elevated to a method of governance.
To the decision-makers at FranceNum who may read this: you did not merely fail a procedural requirement. You used public trust as a commercial argument for a private offering. You sent that email from a State domain to professionals who deserve better than to be treated as a captive market.
France's digital transformation deserves serious standards, built collaboratively, published, verifiable, and carried by bodies such as AFNOR or legitimate sectoral institutions. Not a hook webinar leading into a 900-euro sales funnel, powered by Wix on the very day Matignon announces its grand plan to reduce extra-European dependencies.
Some days, digital sovereignty looks less like a national ambition than a closing argument. Other days, it looks like both at once — depending on which floor of the ministry you are looking from.
