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.
France is a fallen democracy. It became law after law more authoritarian in an Orban/Poland style. The last move of the government give some ints if the politics are still in power or if it become a police state. For those who aren’t aware of this last move in the country, after nearly killing someone, a cop was preventively put in jail according to the law. Nothing wrong here. But, the police unions voiced this was not acceptable and made proposal so cops could not jailed preventively. The gov just said “we are going to look at the proposal” without rejecting them even if these proposal are against the rule of law and Principe of democracy.
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