The Internet’s been ubiquitous for more than two decades now, and the people writing laws to regulate it in most democracies still lack even a high-level understanding about how it and the software they use to access it works. They also seem to go out of their way to avoid working with anyone who actually does know how to implement safety measures in less dangerous or exploitable ways. It’s inexcusable.
They ignore experts/scientists because they’re a liability when all you care about is personal financial gain and fulfilling the role your oligarch/corporate handlers bankrolled you to fulfil.
If browsers are forced to build this system to comply with French laws, it’s only a small step for other governments to leverage this new infrastructure and mandate bans on any website they don’t like.
Senile boomers try to do impossible things in tech because stupid. Censorship is stupid, Google and French goverment hand in hand trying to destroy the free and open internet.
WTF?! „… force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list.“
Today it’s some terrorist / pedophile / fraudulent site, tomorrow it could be some opposition, news or whatever could be disliked site on that list.
How do they propose to enforce this, when browsers are free and open-source and can easily be downloaded from hosts outside of France?
People that propose this kind of stuff always know exactly nothing about how the internet, or technology in general, works.
Not taking their side, but politicians who say that a nuclear plant shouldn’t be built next to a nature preserve don’t have to know the exact physics going on inside it. Common sense and popular opinion that that would be stupid and unnecessarily risky is enough for the decision to stand.
One thing that would save the internet would be to require a passport to be able to use it, ie no more anonymity. Abuse or fakery should get draconian penalties.
I know that would be bad for people of certain countries with oppressive governments, but for the West it would stop the rise of mgtow fascism in its tracks.
Awesome! That way, the next time a minority starts connecting and coordinating using the internet, conservatives can silence them by doxxing them and threatening their families!
True, that’s a drawback but one with less severe consequences for humankind than if we just let this rise of fascism continue.
If the silencing and persecution of minorities is not part of your definition of “the rise of fascism”, you should really gain a better definition of the “fascism” actually is.
Fascism is very well defined and it’s not what you wrote. Just look it up.
And while you’re at it, look up “paradox of tolerance”, too.
When a plane with 20 people on board is bound to crash into a full football stadium with 70.000 people, you’d be the guy who decides to not shoot down the plane because the 20 people shouldn’t be weighed against possibly thousands dying if it crashed into the stadium.
The moral codex in Western countries is to cause as little loss as possible, so the 20 people on board will count less than the thousands on the ground.
Accordingly there oppressed minorities using the Internet to communicate won’t be weighed against the millions of people who’d die in a new Holocaust, which is the final goal of the new fascists.
Fascism is well-defined? With all due respect, this is the kind of statement that betrays a lack of knowledge of the field. Fascism is notorious in political science for being poorly defined both as a system of government and as an ideology.
What constitutes as a definition of fascism and fascist governments has been a complicated and highly disputed subject concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets debated amongst historians, political scientists, and other scholars ever since Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that “trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall”.
For convenience, we can use the Wikipedia definition, which clearly signposts the oppression of political and social minorities as key parts of the definition of fascism.
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
“Paradox of tolerance” does not justify literally any oppressive act.
And yeah, if a plane with 20 people on board is on a glide path towards a stadium, I’m going to be pretty skeptical of anybody who’s just champing at the bit to shoot it down. If we’ve got the time to talk about it, we can evacuate the stadium, or get in contact with the pilot, or scramble a jet to take a look inside and confirm if the occupants are incapacitated, or nudge a wingtip so that it glides into a less populated area. All of which have a better chance of success and are less disruptive than firing an armed missile within civilian airspace. Your unwillingness to consider less extreme options will inadvertently end up empowering authoritarians and enabling the very abuses you nominally wish to prevent.
They don’t have to. Because 90% of the population are either too lazy or too uniformed to do anything but download it from the first link that Google shows them, and the other 10% who care aren’t important enough to warrant enforcement.
I hate that these articles are always couched in excusatory language like, “While motivated by a legitimate concern…”
These people are not your friends, they’re your enemies. Don’t accept their frame in the argument.
Aside this being extremely fucked up. Why do they even feel the need? I’ve been online most my life and have never been defrauded. Are there a shit ton of people in France getting scammed by stupid websites? Did they look at China and go, yes plz? Some authoritarian shit and extremely dangerous. Who’s going to be the fuck that decides which sites to block?
Why do they even feel the need?
Because the idea that the masses can freely disseminate information amongst themselves without needing the clergy or the state or “big media” to control it for them is like a splinter in the upper class’s minds.
Jesus France is really fucking over their people aren’t they?
They’ve had quite an authoritarian tendency since quite a while, with legislation about surveillance and encryption, plus the most violent police in Western Europe (possibly in all of Europe) which was purposefully made to be so through legislation granting them increasing amounts of immunity and legal cover to use ever more harmful equipment to “maintain public order”.
In parallel, quite a lot of ex-PMs of France have been convicted of Corruption.
I suspect these things are related.
I knew those Fr*nch were up to something 😡
Our president. We’re for nothing ._. And yeah, he’s loved by no one
I don’t understand how he’s still the president with how y’all protest sometimes
Because cops are cracking skulls, gouging eyes and blowing hands when they aren’t straight up murdering someone who doesn’t comply with them.
He has the cops and doesn’t hesitate to use them
Fuck you France
How would they enforce this on open source projects without companies behind them?
They can still go after GitHub and GitLab. Even if they self-host, they could go after their domain registrar.
Going after GitHub doesn’t seem viable given that they stood up for YouTube-dl
How is this different to saying “No meetings of groups of people in person to share thoughts, views, agree trades or have an argument”? Happens in the pubs every night.
I guess from the perspective of lawmakers, it’s no different requiring browsers to not display certain sites than requiring book stores to not sell certain books.
I can even see the “logic” in that to a degree, especially if the people talking about it are rather tech averse.
Why should a book store not be allowed to sell certain books? Tf? There’s nothing we can’t find online if we wanted to. Why would anyone want allow some self righteous asshat to determine which books you can and can’t read. Dangerous shit.
Because knowledge is bad for you! Books are the gateway to Satan, and the internet is the devils web!
You should burn your books and smash your computer!
You can trust me, I have a rectangular mustache and paint pictures of doggies!
So educate them?
Is Mozilla 100% forced to comply with this? What’s to stop them from dropping their French presence and keep serving the browser unaltered on the public web? Do they also then get added to the ban list?
The thought behind this is alarming and worrying, but the mechanism of action seems shoddy and not thought out at all.
What happened to parental responsibility?
