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.
Didn’t he say that NATO is braindead.
Though in that instance it’s not really about politics, he’s simply pushing long-standing French security doctrine which insists on strategic autonomy but also wants the whole of Europe to be strategically autonomous so a) the French don’t have to foot the bill alone and b) the US has less opportunity to klutz their dick around.
He said that in 2019, and it was a warning, not a statement, and I believe he was right.
But now that Russia did a moderate amount of tomfoolery, it’s back at full power.