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.
This 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.
On the one hand, the French discovered that snails are edible. That takes some guts.
On the other hand, there was their play during WW2, their notorious love for the resurgence of neofascism, and now this.
I wonder how many more screwups before some guillotines are in order.
Seems a bit disjointed to bundle all those things with browser privacy laws.
motherfucker didn’t even mention cheese
To be fair, cheese being edible is now pretty much worldwide accepted, like pineapple on pizza, and it wasn’t even really “weird” back at the time. Snails on the other hand…
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.
These are the kind of provisions that totalitarian regimes would absolutely benefit from and make regular use of if France or another “western democracy” forced browser developers to develop it. Consider the role that the internet has had in popular uprisings of the last 15 years and its utility for accessing information that oppressive governments want to hide from their citizens.
It might not be as bad as Vichy France or the Rassemblement National, but these provisions definitely pose a major threat to global freedom and would be a gift to the likes of China, Iran and Russia (and I’m sure plenty of US state legislatures would use this for their own ends, looking at you Florida).
