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.
I think most governments who roll out censorship infrastructure don’t really care about whatever they’re actually censoring, they have some juicy target that will come along later like a political rival they miscategorize. To cut them off. They’re building the toolbox they don’t care about the excuse.
So yeah pirate sites give them an excellent reason to say oh we need better tools, but they don’t care about piracy, not really