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.
France wants to outdo everyone else for the worst tech policy ideas in history.
…and, if it’s browser-based, you know it’d touch off a whac-a-mole/arms-race game with French citizens chasing after builds that lack the blacklisting to avoid the risk of being denied access to pirated content and making themselves more vulnerable to malware-infested builds in the process.
Don’t even need builds, when you can download Chromium, Mozilla, or even the Lynx source codes yourself from github.
What are they going to do? Block all open source repositories in the country?
sukru,
This isn’t law yet, so this whole debate is still only theoretical. I’ll be surprised if it passes. Obviously no matter what the law becomes, they cannot stop technologically savvy users. Heck even non-savvy users should be able to download a foreign browser from anywhere else in the world. However they may impose penalties for those caught breaking the law, which can have a chilling effect on civil rights.
Alfman,
MPAA/RIAA tried similar techniques against individual p2p downloaders, saying they “shared” the content with thousands of other users.
But that was not reason p2p decreased. It was because in music 99 cents drm-free mp3 downloads became norm, and in movies netflix happened.
Hence, I am not sure targeting individual users for using an open source browser could work.
(Though they can ask EU websites to block incoming traffic from non-approved browsers, or ask ISPs to include proxies for that, forcing users to use approved ones, at least for most traffic).
sukru,
Those things didn’t become the norm for a long time though. The legal threats and ISP cutoffs had chilling effect on P2P even before the legal services became popular.
I don’t see France implementing a national firewall in the near term, even if they wanted to the cost would be too prohibitive. But, in a hypothetical scenario where France were to pull all the stops, they could learn alot about how to clamp down on open internet access by copying china.
I wonder if the new WEI DRM that’s going into chrome could be used in some way to audit user compliance. It wouldn’t be the internet as we know it, but assuming they mandated the use of national proxies, then they could effectively firewall everything AND check that you aren’t using an unapproved browser.
Everyone was hailing the EU for smacking down companies like Apple and making them open their App Store etc (even though no one is forced to buy apple products or be on Apples App Store) but people forget when you give governments too much power they tend to go overboard and turn the power back on the people. ♂
Windows Sucks,
That’s a whataboutist argument. Just because one bad thing happens doesn’t mean we should let other bad things happen though. We need to be critical of the abuse of public interests wherever it happens, be it in government or corporations.
Alfman,
Yes, in other words: two wrongs don’t make a right.
At least for France, there is EU for the “checks and balances”. Unfortunately UK has their own terrible ideas, especially on strong cryptographic privacy. And I am not sure there is any easy way out there.
If anyone watches YouTube channels discussing movies and TV shows, many of them have presenter ads about using a VPN with country code access so you can watch shows that are not available in your region. Wouldn’t this just mean that a French citizen can install a VPN, set the country to USA or some other region, and see / use / download /etc.? This just seems too simple to circumvent.
unixfish,
A VPN helps in cases where Internet traffic is being blocked, but my understanding is that this proposal isn’t a firewall. It’s just a mandate for browsers to refuse to load blacklisted content. As we’ve been discussing above, this is kind of hard to enforce. Government mandates like this become much more effective on closed devices that don’t normally permit owners to sideload, like an iphone or chromebook.