The Alloncle Report Quantified 4 Billion Euros for Media: The Real Fix Is Blockchain

The Alloncle report finally puts a number on what many suspected: 4 billion euros of public money goes to French media every year. The diagnosis is brave, but the proposed path, cutting budgets, has already failed under Sarkozy and Macron. The real fix is default transparency through blockchain.

A Courageous Diagnosis, Finally Quantified

I have just finished reading the Alloncle report. Unlike many parliamentary documents, it does something few deputies dare to do. It puts exact figures on a situation everyone knew about but nobody said out loud. The report documents 4 billion euros in annual public funding for the media. This is not an estimate or a guess, it is a fact, documented and quantified.

France Télévisions alone receives 2.5 billion euros per year. Radio France gets 614 million. France 24 and RFI together account for nearly 300 million. That is the 4 billion, and it does not even include indirect press subsidies to outlets like Le Monde, Libération and L'Obs. In a country where farmers struggle, small businesses close and families choose between heating and eating, these 4 billion euros are always available, and paid without much difficulty.

The reaction from parts of the left confirms the report hits a nerve. When LFI deputies shout about an attack on press freedom, and journalist unions call it dangerous, it usually means the report has touched something real. Alloncle put his finger where it hurts.

France Télévisions: 2.5 billion euros per year
Radio France: 614 million euros
France 24 and RFI: nearly 300 million euros
Total public audiovisual funding: 4 billion euros, before indirect press aid

Why the Report Stops Short

Here is where I feel disappointed. Alloncle can point to the problem, but he does not offer a real alternative. His implicit solution is to cut or reduce funding. I agree with that direction, but history shows it does not work within the current system.

Look at what happened each time a government tried to reform public media. In 2009, Sarkozy removed advertising from France Télévisions. The result was not independence. The dependence on the state increased. Macron later merged France 3 and France Bleu into a new entity called Ici. Same budget, same logic. The right cuts funding here, the left restores it there. The tap never moves.

The deeper reason is clear. As long as the state controls public money, it controls who can fund what, and it will always act in its own interest. The AFP receives 130 million euros per year from the French state. The AFP supplies news wires to almost the entire French-speaking press. Do you really think a newsroom will bite the hand that feeds it? No. So the disease is diagnosed, but the remedy cannot come from another parliamentary report.

The Structural Disease: Public Money, Private Control

The real problem is not a lack of will from a few honest deputies. The problem is structural. When public money flows through opaque channels, the people who receive it depend on the state. That dependency shapes coverage. It discourages real investigation. It protects the very system the report criticizes.

This opacity is a deliberate feature of the current system, something the beneficiaries like and want to keep. It allows them to spend public money without real public scrutiny. As long as this architecture remains, no budget cut or merger will fix it.

What Blockchain Actually Brings to the Table

My solution rests on a simple principle. Make public financial flows transparent, verifiable and non-modifiable by default. If every payment, every beneficiary and every date is recorded on a public ledger that nobody can alter, the structural problem disappears. You no longer need a courageous deputy to produce a report every ten years. Transparency becomes part of the infrastructure.

We already have the tool to do this. It is called blockchain. I am not talking about crypto speculation, and I am not telling you to buy Bitcoin. The interesting part today is the basic technology. A blockchain is like a giant public register, similar to a shared Google Sheet or an Excel file, but with one crucial difference. Everyone can consult it at any time, from anywhere. Each line records a transaction: who sent what, to whom, and when. Once a line is written, nobody can modify it. Not the state, not a bank, not even the creator of the system. The entry is permanent and verifiable by anyone, at any time.

This is not a crazy theory. It has been working for years.

Proof It Already Works

In 2022, at the start of the war in Ukraine, the Ukrainian government received over 100 million dollars in crypto within a few days. Every donation, every wallet, every expenditure was publicly traceable on the blockchain, and it still is today, forever. Citizens around the world could verify where each euro went and how it was used.

Another decentralized platform distributed more than 50 million dollars to public interest projects, without any opaque selection committee and without state subsidies. Smart contracts enforced transparent, coded rules that everyone could check. The country of Georgia experimented with a land registry on blockchain to solve the problem of falsified property titles. Estonia manages part of its state data with cryptographically verifiable logs. These are real examples, not fantasies.

Applying This to the 4 Billion

Now imagine the Alloncle figure applied to blockchain. Every payment, every beneficiary, every date inscribed on chain, transparent and permanent. Do you think they would still do whatever they want if any citizen can verify in 30 seconds, without waiting two years for a parliamentary commission report that nobody reads? The answer is obvious.

Blockchain does not solve everything, but it solves the fundamental problem Alloncle identified without being able to name it. The opacity around public money is the core issue. Blockchain replaces that opacity with default, permanent transparency.

Why Politicians Will Not Do It, But You Can

Alloncle did his part. He asked the right questions and put real numbers on the table. I admire that. But the answers will not come from another report, another law, or another government promising reform. We have seen that movie too many times. The answers will come from you, from ordinary people who understand the tool already exists.

This transparency is already running on thousands of nodes, 24 hours a day, right now. No state, no central bank, no media lobby can turn off the blockchain. What we need now is to force them to use it. That is the only real path forward.

Conclusion

The Alloncle report is a useful diagnosis, but it stops at the symptom. The disease is structural opacity in public media funding. Cutting budgets has failed under Sarkozy and Macron because the underlying dependency remained. Blockchain offers a way to make public money flows transparent, verifiable and immutable by default. It is not a futuristic utopia, it is already proven in Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia.

Another commission will not fix this. The fix is to demand that public money moves on open ledgers. When every euro is traceable, the cozy relationship between media and the state becomes impossible to hide. The tool exists. The only missing piece is the political will from citizens to demand it.