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.
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?
Firefox is open source but it's controlled by the Mozilla Foundation.
The steps would be
Pass the law
Tell Mozilla they're breaking the law
Do things to them as they're breaking the law
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.
I hope that it would only be the "Frensh Version" of Firefox that implements this and that at least everone outside of France would get a version without this crap. This would then of course, be available to Frensh people to. Hopefully crap laws like this get stoped... lets see
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.
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.
And the thing is, there are open source internet browsers that can be written to avoid any browser checks that a law might require.
However, if Google's browser DRM gets widely implemented, a browser-side content blocker would be effective, because all those open source browsers would be unable to access the wider web.
I think if Big Brother Browser with Google DRM is our future, we're going to see people using 2 browsers as standard. They'll have one "corporate" internet browser, for Instagram, Amazon, whatever. And one "free" browser for all the grey area stuff.
Yes, but we need to fight them politically as it's our money being wasted and they do cause some harms. One is, it keeps the population uninformed about what is with and against the grain of technology. But we also want them to not be trying to do wrong things, even if they are probably unworkable.
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.
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).
And then when in France, I can simply use some other open source browser. This kind of shows how dumb politicians are. Next up? You shouldn't be able to access dangerous software like GitHub, let's block that!
It starts with the basics; piracy, cp, etc. Then it becomes whatever the highest-paying corporation wants to censor. Opposing political views? Check. Anything pro-free thinking? Check. There's no end to this, so we have to head it off at the pass. If corporations own the Web, we have lost (and we're shamefully close to that reality...)
Oh yeah, let the government decide on censorship. I see nothing wrong with that. Oh! I know, let's have a point system based on how much they support the governments policies too!
And this how the end of a civilization or at least of an era looks like.
The neoliberal system of deregulation of the economy and finance sector, of privatization, of weak states on these topics is crashing right in front of us. It requires now non-democratic, authoritarian, decisions to keep the head outside of the water and not shrinks undersea. The destruction of the environment is a symptom of this end.
A small minority wanted unlimited in a limited world. They wanted to touch the stars and burned their fingers. Like arrogant teenagers, they said it's nothing and let find solutions that are no more than placebos. But, even this now doesn't work anymore. They have to use the authoritarian card, another placebo.
It won't change today. It's a long process which can be accelerated if the population takes the lead. They know this fact. The authoritarian card is here to keep the population quite by restricting the access to the information "for the general good". They want to control this aspect of the life too.
But the monster they created is already out of control. It makes and always made more damage than good. They accelerated the neoliberal agenda to keep it calm but it doesn't work. They are running after it and after their inevitable lost.
slightly off point here but, god I hate the term 'neoliberal'. the definition is so far from what you would think based on the word alone, it almost seems intentionally misleading. I have the same gripe with "reactionary politics".
idk when people will realize that capitalism is not conducive to having businesses that are respectful to their consumers and environment, no matter the amount of ill-understood, retrospective regulations you slap on.
EDIT: honestly, I think most people have realized, but the people with the power to change it are the people gaining.
Posted to 'privacy' community: "Put your first and last name on this petition!"
I expect if there are too many fake names it would be used against them too. I think not signing at all is overall less detrimental my own privacy. However if there's evidence/reasoning otherwise please share!
Edit: I ended up signing with my real name, I don't see employers or anyone holding that petition against me if they find out I signed this by searching my name.
Unfortunately, this is gonna happen and worse. We lost the fight for the internet in 2006, and we're watching it die. No joke, I started using yandex browser and search since Google ruined theirs, and it is close to perfect. Waterfox is my backup.
I wouldn't recommend using Yandex, due to it's connections with the Russian government. You should check out privacyguides.org they have a lot of cool info about privacy respecting tools. However I also don't recommend anything Brave. The company was founded by a homophobe who was previously in charge of Mozilla, but left, because of community pressure.
Secondly: Of course this is not happening. Firefox is an open source browser. If they update it to comply with France's bs people will just use an older version or people will fork it and cut out the censoring code.
Also, what about lynx or curl? They certainly will not be censoring shit.
France is going to have a very bad time enforcing this.
Have you tried Yandex? Other than being Russian, it is a great browser. And instead of having to use search operators, rephrase or click verbatim on Google to find something, Yandex actually gives you proper search results, especially in photos. It is like Google before 2016. I used Lynx years ago, totally forgot about it.