Censorship: The French government wants to pass a law that forces browsers to directly block sites

Macron had an excellent idea to censor, even if it starts from positive assumptions, at least in appearance. Under the deserving pretext of blocking minors' access to pornography or eliminating fraudulent sites, the Government is preparing restrictive legislation for Internet access. The draft law is called SREN, and, in the direct words of the government, has these aims:

With this bill, France is taking a series of unprecedented and daring concrete measures aimed at strengthening public order in the digital space. Result of the inter-ministerial work conducted by Mr. Jean-Noël BARROT, this bill contains around twenty proposals aimed in particular at:

• allow the implementation of an anti-fraud computer security filter aimed at protecting French people from attempts to fraudulently access their personal or banking data for malicious purposes, which have multiplied in recent years;
• allow for an increase in penalties for people convicted of cyberbullying, a phenomenon that is spreading on social networks;
• strengthen the system to enforce online age limits for accessing pornographic sites and thus better protect our children;
• penalize sites for failing to remove child sexual abuse content online;
• restore commercial equity in the cloud market, currently concentrated in the hands of a handful of players;
• provide new protections against disinformation and foreign interference caused by the dissemination of media subject to international sanctions;
• adapt national legislation so that two important European regulations that France had adopted during its presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2022 can be applied: the Digital Services Regulation (DSA) and the Digital Markets Regulation (DMA).

The concept of protection against disinformation is already very heavy in itself, because it opens up a discussion between what is news agency information and “disinformation”. A very thin line.

Particularly aggressive though is the Article 6 draft, which plans to require Web browser developers to block Web sites on a government-provided blacklist. This means preventively censoring websites.

Let's take the case of what happened with the covid information: many sites that warned of the adverse effects, which later largely turned out to be real, but opposed to the government's communication. What would prevent the government itself from judging all this as fraudulent communication by forcing browsers to censor everything? Nothing.

Mozilla , very active against this liberticidal legislation, has highlighted the following extremely critical points that question the nature of the network and above all:

• the principle of net neutrality, which ensures that all content is treated equally on the Internet, without discrimination or interference. By requiring browsers to block certain websites, the French government gives itself the power to decide what content is legitimate or not, without going through an independent judicial authority or respecting the right to an effective remedy.
• It undermines the freedom of expression and the right to information of users, who are deprived of access to various potentially critical sources. Browser blocking of websites could have a chilling effect on content publishers, who may self-censor for fear of being blacklisted by the government. It could also lead to errors or abuses, such as blocking legitimate websites by mistake or for political reasons.
• It compromises the security and privacy of users who are exposed to increased risks of hacking, surveillance or censorship. Browser blocking of websites means that browsers have to communicate with the government to receive the list of banned websites, which creates a potential loophole in personal data protection. It also implies that browsers need to modify their normal functioning, which could affect their performance, stability or compatibility with web standards.

So Macron, for the umpteenth time, tries to hide his disasters behind censorship, in this case assisted by Union legislation with the DMA and the DSA. We will see if the legislation in the French parliament will be strong enough to counter the threat, otherwise this legislation risks becoming a dangerous model for other European countries.

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The article Censorship: the French government wants to enact a law that forces browsers to directly block sites comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/censura-il-governo-francese-vuole-varare-una-legge-che-obbliga-i-browser-a-bloccare-direttamente-i-siti/ on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 17:15:38 +0000.