The French government would like to require browsers to block “at the source” access to sites placed on a blacklist. An idea that poses technical as well as ethical problems.
Since the government presented its bill on security in the digital space, we get every day a little more detail on the arsenal that the executive intends to use to block access to sites of illegal content, and more specifically, to prevent minors from viewing pornographic sites. One of these weapons could take the form of blocking “at the source”. Browsers may refuse to display sites blacklisted by the government or competent authorities. The idea is not necessarily bad in itself, but it has many pitfallsin addition to being technically impractical.
According to Mozilla, “in a well-intentioned but dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is about to force browsers to create a dystopian technical capability […] It would require browser vendors to create tools that systematically block websites on a list provided by the government. According to the creators of Firefox, “such a measure will overturn decades of established norms in content moderation and will provide authoritarian governments with a weapon that will render current censorship circumvention tools useless.”
The government wants to force browsers to block sites deemed illegal
The intentions of the French government are certainly noble, but Mozilla raises an important point: such blocking tool integrated directly into the browser according to a list drawn up by a nation-state or a dictatorship presents the risk of significant deviations.
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Moreover, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this type of blocking and filtering of the global Internet constitutes a violation of article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rightswhich grants everyone the right “to seek, receive and impart, regardless of frontiers, information and ideas by any means of expression”.