The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla’s Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.
As always I am reminded that governments are run by the tech illiterate.
If they were run by techies, they’d do even more damage. Authoritarianism is the issue, not tech literacy.
For real - look at the damage “tech literate” corporate leaders are doing to the internet in particular, and society in general. The issue is less about knowledge and aptitude, and more about morals and ethics, and how those principles interact with the desire for profitability driven by investors and owners.
On one hand, yeah
On the other hand, I’m scared about the day when someone who is tech literate gets into government and tries to push stuff like this
Can’t they just put a metal box with a guard around the entire internet?
It is just a black box with a blinking light anyway.
Although the guard might get tired from climbing the stairs of the Elizabeth tower every day.
Elizabeth tower every day.
because the internet has the best reception up there?
It crowd 🤣
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I always thought the derision of that was overblown. You can tell what he meant. It’s not a completely flawed analogy.
Put a sock in that tube there or I’ll fine you.
Firefox being free software, it wouldn’t make much sense for them to try and do something like this. So obviously we know that Mozilla would never go along with such an absurd law and start doing censorship on behalf of France. … right, Mozilla? Slightly strange that you didn’t say so?
True… How would governments enforce dumb laws like that on open source software anyway?
Firefox is open source but it’s controlled by the Mozilla Foundation.
The steps would be
- Pass the law
- Tell Mozilla they’re breaking the law
- Do things to them as they’re breaking the law
It could be fines, it could be banning firefox in France. The good/bad roles are flipped, but anything anyone has tried to do to meta can be done to Mozilla, too. The only alternative Mozilla would have would be purposefully pulling Firefox from France.
Ultimately, Mozilla would have a vote of some kind, deciding to capitulate or pull firefox (or just keep paying fees, potentially, but they’re not made of money).
What stops them from putting a blanket statement on their website stating “this software does not adhere to specific internet laws in france and therefor we do not support the use of firefox as a browser within french borders. French people can still download firefox to study the software and use it for local/offline purposes.
Firefox isn’t quite the same as facebook in that its a piece of downloadable software instead of a service website. You don’t need an account. A foreigner can travel while having firefox as the only browser on their laptop and people can still share the program between eachother.
France might create requirements for their isps to not service not adhering browsers but in any way mozzila can keep their hands clean.
Making something available when it’s not legal to do so is still a crime. Mozilla can’t put the burden of “Is this illegal?” on the downloader. On top of that, with the specific nature of this law, they’ll likely get added to this blocked list.
“For research” changes nothing, there isn’t an exception for research in the French law (as far as I know, at least).
Nothing would stop a French person from taking extra steps to circumvent the law, so it’s true that it could be gotten around with a VPN or peer-to-peer sharing of the installer, and Mozilla isn’t liable for that, but also that would still dramatically reduce Firefox installs in France. It isn’t really a good solution for Firefox to need the same steps as piracy for people to access it.
Firefox not needing user accounts isn’t that relevant, because it’s the distribution of illegal software that will be acted upon.
While it’s true that they wouldn’t necessarily have to pay a French fine, most large companies have assets in a lot of nations. For Mozilla, this could be people that translate the browser to French, who may have office space or supplies, and the French government could seize Mozilla’s French assets, which also impacts their other projects like Thunderbird.
A search tells me they do have such an office in Paris which would be threatened by their noncompliance, which does include just telling French people it’s illegal but letting them do it anyway.
Its gonna depend on specifics in the law. Is it about
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a software component that allows viewing a web page.
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software that is marketed as an internet browser
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software that is being used to connect to the web
Many software is or can technically be used to browse the web. Thunderbird as a notable example is a mail client but is a capable of displaying any weburl. Some of the software i use on my job is capable of doing the same. Visual studio can do this. It used to be a very common feature.
The ad window when you start steam works like this and the inbuild steam Browser aside the entire steam store also functions as a locked down browser. It even shows a url bar but at least here you cant enter any url.
Depending on the law these softwares need to either comply or be excempt.
With self hosting getting popular and the trend of webapps (many of the self hosted ai apps) you dont need to be online to have a valid usecase.
If i go on holiday to France, never connect to any french internet but use a self developed browser to acces a local run webbapp am I suddenly a criminal?
If i am an open source developer workin on any of the plenty of github repos that rely or build on mozzilas open source code am i a criminal? Should GitHub be blocked because it provided acces to those repos to the french?
I do agree if mozilla has a registered company in french that those could indeed be targeted by the government but if there not surely they cant be blamed by simply ignoring foreign laws.
Piracy and porn can have wildly different laws around the world i only ever heard of countries blocking providing domains trough isps and never that far away foreign companies are supposed to take notice of local Law.
The account thing matters because this establishes a relation of client and service provider. Facebook services millions of european customers and businesses of which it actively manages data. Mozilla in contrast mostly just build a tool that any anonymous internet person can use for themselves.
Mozilla still has terms and conditions, so there’s still a relationship, and still a liability for them letting a customer misuse their browser, even if they don’t keep data on everyone.
While I absolutely agree it’s ridiculous, as I read it, it would also apply to self-hosted software and things like thunderbird that are technically a browser.
Still, I expect enforcement to really only care about “real” browsers, not one user and their own thing or someone using Thunderbird to browse the web. France (and most other governments) have shown multiple times that they don’t really look into the how they’d do these things before they try to make it law and it’d be a mess.
As per the article this post linked, this would definitely be a new precedent, browsers have never been responsible for this content, and whatever actually happens is up in the air. I’m mostly talking worst-case scenario. It’s entirely possible some other business or consumer protection law makes this unenforceable, or any number of other situations, but since the French government decides how unreasonable they’re gonna be, that’s all up to them. Maybe they crusade against Firefox, maybe they give up when they realize there’s only so much to do without drafting even more, and maybe they do go after everyone, including thunderbird or any other app that opens a webpage. Probably just ones that navigate to the illegal webpages though.
Still, a measure that’s completely defeated by a VPN, unless they add all of them to their illegal pages.
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They could still charge the leadership, fine them, and cause life to be a bit more difficult. Even if I don’t live in a country, I wouldn’t want that hanging over my head.
It’s hard not living in a country
I guess it cannot be completely enforced. What they can do, however, is to say that Firefox is illegal in France unless it complies with their unjust laws.
Mozilla could either choose to comply and release a French version of Firefox with government mandated fixes, or decide not to comply and probably block firefox.com from being accessible from France. This would make it harder for French users to find an alternative browser, making even more people will stick to the pre-installed Chromium based one.
In general it’s just not a good thing when open source software becomes illegal, no matter how hard the laws might be to implement.
Why would it be mozzilas responsibility to make their website unaccesible in france rather then that being the responsibility of french isp?
If north Korea puts up an obscure law that says all sites are banned from using english does that give them grounds to sue any sites that didn’t think of blocking them specifically?
This would make it harder for French users to find an alternative browser, making even more people will stick to the pre-installed Chromium based one.
Sad as it is, I think this is the optimal solution when it goes through. A lot of EU countries are against monopolies (France is not an exception), this way they would realize they are enforcing a monopoly and singular dependency.
They dont consider chromium based browsere a monopoly because there are over 10 different ones from different companies. The fact they are all chromium behind the scenes and all comply with google’s bullshit standards doesnt matter to them.
Unless every browser ignores them. Then what they’re going to fine Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla and declare the internet illegal in France?
It just seems so absurd I can’t take it seriously. There’s zero way to make this actually work. If they want to ban websites they’d have to go full China on it.
I agree. If you give in to laws like these you have already lost; people will just accept their freedom being stripped away piece by piece, and government control of software will be the new normal. If on the other hand we reach a point where Firefox is illegal in France, it should be obvious to anyone and especially those involved in competition law that something is not right.
France is on a bad spree lately, and honestly they need all the bad publicity they can get. I hope this backfires for them.
The software can be open source, the product is branded and published.
I hope that it would only be the “Frensh Version” of Firefox that implements this and that at least everone outside of France would get a version without this crap. This would then of course, be available to Frensh people to. Hopefully crap laws like this get stoped… lets see
It would work for 95% of browser users, who will not know that they can use a fork of Firefox because they have no idea what that means.
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Why forcing the browsers? Couldn’t they just make a law for ISPs to block specific domains?
This is already possible (and is actively used, mainly for piracy related websites) with the current laws.
Aand it’s never enough
Too easy to bypass that with a VPN, proxy, or alternative DNS.
But like, can’t they just download the non France version of Firefox? Isn’t it open source? People can just build their own, right?
Yeah.
Yes but 90% of the people using Firefox won’t bother or notice. I already struggle trying to make all my relatives switch to Firefox, I can’t imagine getting them to download a specific version or build it themselves…
But the same applies for the other workarounds mentioned doesn’t it?
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/1q1hjmwLqe4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Why do right wingers hate freedom so much?
Its nothing to do with the right wing and everythiny to do with authoratarianism. Left wing authoratarians hate freedom just as much. They just usually attafk different targets.
Why do right wingers hate freedom so much?
What? Am I on crazy pills? This has nothing to do with polticial leaning. Its man VS big gov.
what political leaning do you thing this “big gov” has?
A globalist leaning. Macron if I recall comes from big money in the financial world. The do not have a leaning poltically, they are amoral, dark triad.
Because they see the freedom of people who aren’t like them as an abridgement of their freedom to force everyone to be like them.
“Do you not know my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” 🤷♂️
Ok, it’s a freedom and free speech nightmare, but are they stupid or something? They are aiming for the browsers instead of ISPs (and DNSes?)?
They tried this in the UK and the ISPs is just ignored them. So the government declared its success anyway, despite the fact that essentially nothing had happened, and then stopped talking about it.
These laws always come up by people whose grasp of technology is basically, make magic box do thing x. They don’t understand that people smarter than them (school kids) will find workarounds in about 10 seconds.
And the thing is, there are open source internet browsers that can be written to avoid any browser checks that a law might require.
However, if Google’s browser DRM gets widely implemented, a browser-side content blocker would be effective, because all those open source browsers would be unable to access the wider web.
I think if Big Brother Browser with Google DRM is our future, we’re going to see people using 2 browsers as standard. They’ll have one “corporate” internet browser, for Instagram, Amazon, whatever. And one “free” browser for all the grey area stuff.
Yes, but we need to fight them politically as it’s our money being wasted and they do cause some harms. One is, it keeps the population uninformed about what is with and against the grain of technology. But we also want them to not be trying to do wrong things, even if they are probably unworkable.
I “think” I remember them trying something like this before with the ISPs and it got smacked down.
Because DNS will do little and browsers will do straight up nothing. Especially for the good open source browsers.
So things like curl or lynx would be illegal eh? Good luck enforcing those.
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I guess you could argue that a simple http client is not a browser, so these would be excluded. But if you write code yourself to use an http client to make a browser, then you would have to implement Frances’s bullshit to be legal in France.
But that depends on how you legally distinguish between a simple http client and a browser…
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I do not like france
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I like the french government even less
I am French and I state that in fact I do not like France
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That’s what’s happened in other countries that have tried to implement this. Unless you want to basically go the Chinese route and ban all exterior access it’s an utterly unenforceable law. Which I am sure they would have been told if they had bothered to consult anybody with domain knowledge.
because it sets a precedent. “oh france did it, its not too bad”
Can we sign it even it we don’t live in France?
Yes
Now imagine if something like this would happen after Google manages to DRM the internet? You won’t even be able to fork the browser…
If worse comes to worst, someone can fork Firefox and remove the in-browser censorship. That is the beauty of FOSS.
Unfortunately the 99% that don’t know about less popular options will still be affected
True, however it will require some grassroots movement/discussion to make it known.
Whelp, I signed in the dumbest way possible. Signed under the name Lupine Arsène. Only thing I regret is not putting the country as France to complete the dumb joke.
Signed. Although I wanted to ask if it has any value if it was signed by someone from outside of France/not French?
Even petitions from within France don’t have any value. Our current government doesn’t really care about this kind of action (or any type of action, actually).
That’s a bummer… Well my name is there, as useless as it may be.
