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Germany's free pool piles into Frankfurt because that is where the cheap compute is. France does not work the same way. Its largest home-grown cloud, OVHcloud, built its flagship datacenters in Roubaix and Gravelines, up near the Belgian border, rather than in Paris, and a big share of French hosting address space sits there as a result. So a French datacenter IP is at least as likely to resolve to the north as to the capital, which is the opposite of the single-city concentration you see in a lot of countries.

That is exactly why the live picture on our free list is worth reading rather than assuming. It shows where our French pool actually sits and on which networks, instead of defaulting to a Paris story that would be wrong for France specifically.

Two changes are quietly reshaping which networks a French address belongs to. Orange is retiring its old copper network on a published timetable that runs to 2030, moving households onto fiber in annual waves, so the DSL-era address ranges are steadily being pulled out from under French homes and replaced. If you monitor French residential supply over time, you are watching a moving target with a government- supervised curve behind it.

The bigger shift is at the top. As of mid-2026 France still has four mobile networks, Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free, but a deal signed in June 2026 would split SFR between its three rivals and, if it completes as expected around 2027 subject to regulatory approval, take France back to three operators for the first time since 2012. It is signed, not done, and we date it here on purpose so the sentence ages honestly. For a proxy buyer it means the network behind a French address is due to be reshuffled, which is one more reason to trust a measured snapshot over a static claim.

France is a near-200-billion-euro online market, so most French-IP work is retail price and listing monitoring across Amazon, Leboncoin and the big French shops, plus search tracking now that google.fr redirects to google.com and an IP is what selects a French result. France carries the same discount rule as Germany: an advertised price cut has to reference the lowest price of the previous 30 days, and the EU court's reading says the headline percentage must be computed from that low. French sale windows are also set by regulation rather than by each shop, so discount advertising clusters into fixed national periods, which makes French price monitoring seasonal in a way the law imposes. The automated side of all this can run a French exit through our scraper APIs.

France is unusual on the law, and worth being straight about. Its data regulator, the CNIL, has actually published guidance on how to collect data by scraping lawfully when personal data is involved, which is the opposite of a ban. At the same time its highest court has twice held that systematically extracting a competitor's structured listings can infringe the database producer's right, especially where the copy substitutes for the original source. Those are two different laws answering two different questions, and France has clear, recent authority on both. We sell the French footprint for legitimate work; our terms ask you to respect both sides of that line, and a competitor's database or anything personal is a question worth taking to a lawyer.