CENSORSHIP: Web browsers could soon be required by law to block traffic to what the government labels “fraudulent” websites

CENSORSHIP: Web browsers could soon be required by law to block traffic to what the government labels “fraudulent” websites

Ethan Huff

The French government has issued a worrying proposal that Mozilla's Open Policy & Advocacy blog is warning could eventually lead to governments being able to block all websites deemed "fraudulent."

Calling the plan "well-intentioned yet dangerous," Mozilla warns that the French government is plowing ahead with plans to force web browsers like Firefox "to create a dystopian technical capability" allowing bureaucrats to regulate what people see online.

"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," Mozilla explains about the plan.

"A world in which browsers can be forced to incorporate a list of banned websites at the software-level that simply do not open, either in a region or globally, is a worrying prospect that raises serious concerns around freedom of expression. If it successfully passes into law, the precedent this would set would make it much harder for browsers to reject such requests from other governments."

(Related: Even before the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) appeared out of nowhere, Google was already pushing a "final solution" to eradicate independent news sites from the web forever.)

Since the deep state is having trouble containing the spread of "misinformation" online via content providers and publishers (i.e., Facebook, Google, and Twitter), it is apparently switching tactics to go after browsers themselves.

We are told that the government would basically feed a website blacklist to web browser creators like Mozilla and force them to encode a block that disallows internet users from accessing certain websites.

"There would be no way around that censorship, short of hacking the browser code. That might be an option for open source coders, but it certainly won't be for the vast majority of ordinary users."

Should this proposed law be enshrined on the books, it will do away with what Mozilla describes as "decades of established content moderation norms," effectively allowing authoritarian governments to "easily negate the existence of censorship circumvention tools."

It is not a stretch to assume that the copyright industry would also capitalize on the law by trying to force web browsers to also block websites that contain infringing content. In fact, such a concept has already been brought to life in the past – check out the book Walled Culture to learn more.