If the Web has become the world’s largest democracy, the French are hard-lining to regulate its free markets: A tax on portals like Google and a cap on the amount of time that personal information remains online were both put on the table this week.

As part of ongoing efforts to curb the illegal acquisition of music and movies online, Sarkozy and his French government want a tax levied on the advertising revenue of online informational portals like Google, AOL and Yahoo. A French report issued in support of the tax decries Google – and the rest of the Internet – for allegedly ruining Europe’s cultural foundations by fostering the illegal exchange of music and other files.

There’s no real plan of action as to how and when such a tax could be planned and implemented, or how it would actually function and in what regions. But its revenue would be used to encourage the legal acquisition of files online through various government programs.

In an equally vague crusade against electronic information flows, a “right-to-forget” law is being discussed in France to protect the reputations of individuals whose personal information has, at some point, been accessible online. The proposed measure would give Internet users the option to have information taken offline after a period of time and would likely cater to celebrities and controversial figures who’d been written about negatively by bloggers.

The right-to-forget law, unlike the Google tax, is not attempting to curb illegal activity – only to delineate between “good content” and “bad content” as pure reputation management – a nearly impossible task that should probably be left strictly to the consumers of online content.