In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list. Such a move will overturn decades of established content moderation norms and provide a playbook for authoritarian governments that will easily negate the existence of censorship circumvention tools.
While motivated by a legitimate concern, this move to block websites directly within the browser would be disastrous for the open internet and disproportionate to the goals of the legal proposal – fighting fraud. It will also set a worrying precedent and create technical capabilities that other regimes will leverage for far more nefarious purposes. Leveraging existing malware and phishing protection offerings rather than replacing them with government provided, device level block-lists is a far better route to achieve the goals of the legislation.
Do you genuinely believe an average computer user, when presented with a block page, would attempt to circumvent it?
Maybe a small minority would, but overall I find it extremely unlikely. It takes a lot less effort to just download an alternative.
The average computer user is terrified of change so if they couldn’t dl chrome they’d mass google 'how to download chrome when blocked ', then land on a reddit thread of people complaining they can’t dl chrome where someone posts the exe or msi and leap on it.
We’ve already seen this play out in several countries where web blocking is widely implemented (eg Russia, China.) People (generally) flock to state-endorsed alternatives rather than going through the effort of finding bypasses.
(As an aside, Chrome would probably comply with it. It’d be a lot more damaging for them than smaller browsers to block the entirety of France.)
China’s a bit of a bad example as it’s got extremely heavy cultural indoctrination that reinforces the tactic - and even then it’s not entirely successful.
Russia is notoriously the home of lip service while violating the letter of the law in every way imaginable