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.
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
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).
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.
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?
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.
Too easy to bypass that with a VPN, proxy, or alternative DNS.
Either way it's still a software restriction that can be bypassed with other software.
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?
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.
"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.
I do not like france
I am French and I state that in fact I do not like France
How the fuck could a law like that possibly be enforceable? Mozilla should just tell them to go fuck themselves, offer alternative IPs so people can get around country-wide DNS blocks, and then go about their day. Who cares what some spineless country wants?
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.
So things like curl or lynx would be illegal eh? Good luck enforcing those.
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.
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.
Somehow, I don't think ruthless authoritarians are going to care about what the little people think.
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).
Maybe this is a stupid question, but how does France have jurisdiction to force features into a web browser made by an American company?
They are free to try and compel them and Mozilla would be free to stop operating in France.
What does "stop operating in France" even mean? It's not like they are selling their browser to the French people...
Signed. Enough with this kind of bullshit in the EU.
Signed and shared on Mastodon
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