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.
While motivated by a legitimate concern, this move to block websites directly within the browser would be disastrous for the open internet and disproportionate to the goals of the legal proposal – fighting fraud. It will also set a worrying precedent and create technical capabilities that other regimes will leverage for far more nefarious purposes. Leveraging existing malware and phishing protection offerings rather than replacing them with government provided, device level block-lists is a far better route to achieve the goals of the legislation.
I read through the entire thing, in French, and it references several other laws and European regulations. The browser part is only in those paragraphs of the bill, but those paragraphs are referenced throughout the bill so there might be more to it. The whole bill is 91 pages long.
It was adopted on 5 July, by the way…
The blog post from Mozilla does say, “France’s browser-based website blocking proposal will set a disastrous precedent for the open internet,” so the precedent here is what they’re worried about.