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.
The article is not very clear about what exactly the proposal mandate. Create the means for browser to block websites, or forces browser to block certain websites by the geolocation they are operating in?
Because I don’t understand how the later would work.
From the wording it seems like they are only asking browser developers to provide a function to block websites. (maybe byimporting a block list?)
I think they do not know this themselves. France had already implemented a black list on DNS level. F.i. library genesis links cannot be reached through standard DNS.
I figure they think that that’s not oppressive enough.