Some scams have the merit of honesty. They make no pretense of being anything other than what they are. And then there are these — the worst kind — that arrive dressed up as public services, stamped with a .gouv.fr domain, and sell you, with all the composure of the Republic, a sticker for a thousand euros.
FranceNum. Root domain: finances.gouv.fr. The Ministry of Economy, no less. When the State lends its authority to an initiative, it pledges 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, you start to see right through it.
The mechanism is of a sordid elegance.
A private company — selected according to criteria no one bothered to publish, through a process that owes more to personal networks than to transparent tendering — is entrusted with the sovereign right to affix a label onto businesses. A label that, in the recipient's mind, bears the seal of the State.
The evaluation 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 no one 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 don't yet have, using the money you advance so they can acquire it. A business model that consumes trust and gives back stickers.
The crowning irony, the cherry on the administrative mille-feuille, is the showcase of this virtuous operator of France's digital transformation. A website hosted on Wix — registered headquarters: Tel Aviv. DNS infrastructure and domain managed through IONOS — registered headquarters: Berlin.
Let us be clear: there is nothing intrinsically 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 service companies, web agencies, and developers on their practices, their ethics, their technological sovereignty — it would be decent, at the very minimum, not to run your homepage on the servers of an Israeli freemium website builder.
The dissonance is so brutal it almost becomes comic. 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: you simply had to change a digit in a URL to access another user's account. The result: 11.7 million accounts officially compromised, with up to 19 million mentioned on cybercriminal forums.
The vulnerability was, in the words of the hacker himself, "really stupid." A qualifier worth meditating on by anyone who is about to hand out digital quality medals.
And what does the Prime Minister do in the face of this disaster? According to Le Canard enchaîné, Sébastien Lecornu has decided to sideline ANSSI, the agency he holds partly responsible for failing to secure sensitive government websites. An institutional purge. Meanwhile, the victims wait.
So here is the full picture: the State is incapable of securing its own portals against a 15-year-old armed with a script, yet via 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 uncontrolled private intermediaries. FranceNum is not an isolated case: it is a symptom of a well-entrenched 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 legal experts call, in the most serious cases, misrepresentation as to the nature of the service.
The ultimate paradox is institutional, and it is playing out today.
On this 13th of May 2026, Acteurs publics reveals that Sébastien Lecornu has just designated the prefigurators of two new structures intended to rebuild the digital architecture of the State. Walter Arnaud, a senior armaments engineer, 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 inter-ministerial digital foundation and reducing dependencies on non-European actors.
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 toward 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 funding, via the State's official stamp, a privatised label hosted outside France. This is not incoherence. It is administrative schizophrenia elevated into a method of governance.
To the decision-makers at FranceNum who may perhaps read this: you did not merely bungle a procedure. You used public trust as a commercial argument for a private offering. You sent that email from a government 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're looking from.
