For some time now I have been searching for a use for France. I am not alone – successive French governments have grappled with the question since De Gaulle, passing it on with the unopened bills at every handover of power.

Finally I think I have it. It was the impressive fessée the French culture minister and novelist Aurélie Filippetti delivered to Amazon's ambitions of inter-galactic domination last week that convinced me that the home of fast trains, super jumbos that don't fill with smoke on take-off and that wonderful little word "non", might have something left to teach us.

Her speech to parliament in defence of the fixed price of books that has kept so many French independent bookshops and publishing houses going didn't quite have the grandeur of Dominique de Villepin warning of the folly of Bush and Blair on Iraq, but it may come to be seen as the day the push-back against internet robber barons began.

Deputies of left and right voted to order Amazon by law not to discount books by more than 5% if it was delivering them for free. This was roundly denounced – outside France – as classic "moronic" anti-market, protectionist, neanderthal Frenchness. Some US libertarians went as far as to call it a tax, with all the threat of air strikes that implies.

Forbes magazine, guardian of the hadiths of global neoliberalism, was more gracious, putting it down to French irrationality. "They don't get Adam Smith," it sighed. Actually, it's because they do understand Smith (who was appalled by French monopolies when he studied there) that they have put the boot into Amazon and saddled it with a $252m tax bill. Contrast this with rational Britain, where on £4.2bn of sales last year Amazon paid a mere £2.4m in tax, only to get it all back and more in government grants.

Price-fixing is of course wrong. Which is why Amazon has been doing it in secret for years until France, Germany and the British Office of Fair Trading forced it in August to allow sellers in its marketplace to sell for cheaper elsewhere, but only in the EU. Amazon continues to sucker consumers in the US and elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong. Amazon has got me out of many a fix – one click (Amazon world trademark) and you are away. Nor are all independent bookshops run by enlightened polymaths who appear by magic with an armchair and a cappuccino at the first sign of ennui. Opening a bookshop door in the Latin Quarter can feel like intruding – as if you had stepped into a League of Gentleman sketch: "Ooh, my precious books!" I am not even sure bookshops are a better way of finding good books. But I know that I want the choice. And Amazon – whether by accident or design – is in the business of taking that choice away.

France has recognised that we are facing a new way of business as infernal as the one that ground the life out of the coalminers in Zola's Germinal, a privacy-invading, monopolising, price-fixing, tax-dodging internet capitalism that in Amazon's case aims to infiltrate damn near every spending decision in our lives. Amazon has slipped into our head and hearts through the open door of our love of books and music, and is now going through everything inside like a burglar.

As we sign our rights away every other day on the net with a click, we desperately need a France to renegotiate our world for us.

Along with caca boudin (poo sausage), the words you will hear most in every Paris playground are "non!", "c'est moi qui decide!" (I decide) and "réfléchis!" (think about it).

While I am no champion of the French education system – only an idiot of the order of Michael Gove would borrow much more than the Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité above the school door – it does teach one thing. Analysis. My three-year-old comes home from school not telling stories, but delivering her analysis of them.

"The wolf is the hero. The rabbit the victim," she pronounced gravely over her glasses the other day. "Tell me the story," I begged, a typical non-French sucker for narrative.

"It's a wolf and a rabbit – what do you think happened?", she deadpanned.

In the unequal struggle against the outlandish power Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple et al now exercise over our lives, we need to all start thinking like French three-year-olds and start yelling back, "Non! C'est moi qui decide! Caca boudin!"