// Comparison

Cybercriminalité vs Cyberstructure: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Policy, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Intermediate
3/52010
Cybercriminalité

Droit pénal appliqué

Myriam Quéméner, Yves Charpenel

A practitioner's treatment of cybercrime law — offences, procedure, and the application of criminal law to digital crime — by a French magistrate specialised in the field.

Intermediate
4/52018
Cyberstructure

L'Internet, un espace politique

Stéphane Bortzmeyer

An engineer's lucid account of how the Internet actually works — and why its technical architecture is a political space that shapes human rights — by a DNS specialist at AFNIC.

Read this if

Lawyers, magistrates, compliance teams and investigators who need the legal framework around cybercrime: what's punishable, how procedure works, how the law is applied.
Technically curious readers, policy people and engineers who want to understand the link between Internet plumbing (DNS, routing, protocols) and politics: privacy, censorship, surveillance, freedom. Won the FIC Cyber Book Prize 2019.

Skip this if

Technical readers wanting attacks or defence; this is a French-law legal text, and parts of any 2010 legal book are superseded by newer legislation.
Readers after a security how-to or a pure tech manual. The book is about the politics embedded in infrastructure, not about attacking or defending systems.

Key takeaways

  • A specialist legal reference on French cybercrime law, by a magistrate who works the field.
  • Covers the offences, procedure and application of criminal law to digital crime.
  • Law evolves: read for the framework and reasoning, but verify specifics against current legislation.
  • Rare book that explains Internet infrastructure precisely and draws out its political consequences without hand-waving on either side.
  • Bortzmeyer is a working DNS/networks engineer, so the technical descriptions are accurate, not journalistic approximations.
  • Reframes privacy and freedom as design choices baked into protocols — essential context for anyone in security or policy.

How they compare

We rate Cyberstructure higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Cybercriminalité). For most readers, that means Cyberstructure is the primary pick and Cybercriminalité is a useful follow-up.

Both books target intermediate-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

Cybercriminalité and Cyberstructure both cover Policy, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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