The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla’s Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.
Firefox being free software, it wouldn’t make much sense for them to try and do something like this. So obviously we know that Mozilla would never go along with such an absurd law and start doing censorship on behalf of France. … right, Mozilla? Slightly strange that you didn’t say so?
True… How would governments enforce dumb laws like that on open source software anyway?
I guess it cannot be completely enforced. What they can do, however, is to say that Firefox is illegal in France unless it complies with their unjust laws.
Mozilla could either choose to comply and release a French version of Firefox with government mandated fixes, or decide not to comply and probably block firefox.com from being accessible from France. This would make it harder for French users to find an alternative browser, making even more people will stick to the pre-installed Chromium based one.
In general it’s just not a good thing when open source software becomes illegal, no matter how hard the laws might be to implement.
Why would it be mozzilas responsibility to make their website unaccesible in france rather then that being the responsibility of french isp?
If north Korea puts up an obscure law that says all sites are banned from using english does that give them grounds to sue any sites that didn’t think of blocking them specifically?
This would make it harder for French users to find an alternative browser, making even more people will stick to the pre-installed Chromium based one.
Sad as it is, I think this is the optimal solution when it goes through. A lot of EU countries are against monopolies (France is not an exception), this way they would realize they are enforcing a monopoly and singular dependency.
Unless every browser ignores them. Then what they’re going to fine Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla and declare the internet illegal in France?
It just seems so absurd I can’t take it seriously. There’s zero way to make this actually work. If they want to ban websites they’d have to go full China on it.
They dont consider chromium based browsere a monopoly because there are over 10 different ones from different companies. The fact they are all chromium behind the scenes and all comply with google’s bullshit standards doesnt matter to them.
I agree. If you give in to laws like these you have already lost; people will just accept their freedom being stripped away piece by piece, and government control of software will be the new normal. If on the other hand we reach a point where Firefox is illegal in France, it should be obvious to anyone and especially those involved in competition law that something is not right.
France is on a bad spree lately, and honestly they need all the bad publicity they can get. I hope this backfires for them.
They could still charge the leadership, fine them, and cause life to be a bit more difficult. Even if I don’t live in a country, I wouldn’t want that hanging over my head.
It’s hard not living in a country
The software can be open source, the product is branded and published.
I hope that it would only be the “Frensh Version” of Firefox that implements this and that at least everone outside of France would get a version without this crap. This would then of course, be available to Frensh people to. Hopefully crap laws like this get stoped… lets see
It would work for 95% of browser users, who will not know that they can use a fork of Firefox because they have no idea what that means.
Right, these type of solutions are akin to changing your SSH port number. It works >90% of the time, but anyone skilled or determined can easily bypass these restrictions for given targets.
Did you know: Using adblockers is considered terrorist activity in france?
Is a “No soliciting” sign on my house also terrorism then? Wtf
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Why forcing the browsers? Couldn’t they just make a law for ISPs to block specific domains?
This is already possible (and is actively used, mainly for piracy related websites) with the current laws.
Aand it’s never enough
Why do right wingers hate freedom so much?
Why do right wingers hate freedom so much?
What? Am I on crazy pills? This has nothing to do with polticial leaning. Its man VS big gov.
what political leaning do you thing this “big gov” has?
A globalist leaning. Macron if I recall comes from big money in the financial world. The do not have a leaning poltically, they are amoral, dark triad.
Because they see the freedom of people who aren’t like them as an abridgement of their freedom to force everyone to be like them.
Its nothing to do with the right wing and everythiny to do with authoratarianism. Left wing authoratarians hate freedom just as much. They just usually attafk different targets.
“Do you not know my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” 🤷♂️
Ok, it’s a freedom and free speech nightmare, but are they stupid or something? They are aiming for the browsers instead of ISPs (and DNSes?)?
I “think” I remember them trying something like this before with the ISPs and it got smacked down.
Because DNS will do little and browsers will do straight up nothing. Especially for the good open source browsers.
Can we sign it even it we don’t live in France?
How the fuck could a law like that possibly be enforceable? Mozilla should just tell them to go fuck themselves, offer alternative IPs so people can get around country-wide DNS blocks, and then go about their day. Who cares what some spineless country wants?
because it sets a precedent. “oh france did it, its not too bad”
If worse comes to worst, someone can fork Firefox and remove the in-browser censorship. That is the beauty of FOSS.
Unfortunately the 99% that don’t know about less popular options will still be affected
True, however it will require some grassroots movement/discussion to make it known.
I do not like france
I am French and I state that in fact I do not like France
Whelp, I signed in the dumbest way possible. Signed under the name Lupine Arsène. Only thing I regret is not putting the country as France to complete the dumb joke.
Now imagine if something like this would happen after Google manages to DRM the internet? You won’t even be able to fork the browser…
So things like curl or lynx would be illegal eh? Good luck enforcing those.
What about HTTP client libraries for every computer language? Even if they went as far as to ban curl and lynx, with many languages you could whip up an HTTP client to pull whatever content you need in five minutes. This might be totally unenforceable at that level as people could modify the library or write code themselves.
I guess you could argue that a simple http client is not a browser, so these would be excluded. But if you write code yourself to use an http client to make a browser, then you would have to implement Frances’s bullshit to be legal in France.
But that depends on how you legally distinguish between a simple http client and a browser…
Ah I’m not talking about being legal or producing a product for others. I’m talking about how one might procure data authorities are trying to make unavailable.
Signed. Enough with this kind of bullshit in the EU.
Signed. Although I wanted to ask if it has any value if it was signed by someone from outside of France/not French?
Even petitions from within France don’t have any value. Our current government doesn’t really care about this kind of action (or any type of action, actually).
That’s a bummer… Well my name is there, as useless as it may be.
