This is just plain stupid.

Forcing browser to block certain sites is like making car manufacturers make the car shutdown if you are trying to smuggle foreign cheese in to France.

Tech illiterates making the decision here.

Could companies just refuse, and place a "this product is not available in your country" on the download page

If people download the incompatible browser anyways then ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

What in the ever loving hell is up with France's current government right now? It's like Macron has said fuck it, lets give the fascists a way to sneak in

This Macron guy is really trying to make people hate him isn't he. At this point it feels like he actually wants the French to burn shit.

While I could see maybe the larger companies operating in France agreeing to implement this, I don't think they would be able to legally force a smaller foreign open source browser developer into the same practice? Take qutebrowser for instance, the developer is from Switzerland. Unless their website is hosted in France, I don't see how French law applies to him, nor the site he is hosting the browser on? They would have to use ISPs to block the website, but even then, you could still get it through GitHub. Maybe GitHub could be forced into removing the browser as Microsoft probably have a French office, but it still seems like a legal and practical nightmare to actually enforce this through the browser. As someone else mentioned, pushing rules on ISPs seems like a more doable thing if you WANT to oppress people (which I am also against of course).

Ill compile Firefox if I need to

Why does my country keeps doing shit like this! I wasn't even aware of that one, what the hell! ;-;

France is a fallen democracy. It became law after law more authoritarian in an Orban/Poland style. The last move of the government give some ints if the politics are still in power or if it become a police state. For those who aren't aware of this last move in the country, after nearly killing someone, a cop was preventively put in jail according to the law. Nothing wrong here. But, the police unions voiced this was not acceptable and made proposal so cops could not jailed preventively. The gov just said "we are going to look at the proposal" without rejecting them even if these proposal are against the rule of law and Principe of democracy.

More about this shitshow

Interesting share. Thanks.

I live in France and we are more interested in the part of this law that wants to put age restrictions on pornographic websites, so this is the first I've heard of it.

Jean-Noël Barrot, a business school graduate, is Minister for Digital Transition and Telecommunications. He is the leader on this project.

As noted by Mozilla, it comes down to 2 paragraphs, but I've included the paragraphs before and after below. This law overlaps with European regulation too:

Article 6

1. Article 12 of the aforementioned law no. 2004-575 of June 21, 2004 reads as follows:

2. "Art. 12 - I. - When one of its specially designated and empowered agents observes that an online public communication service is clearly carrying out operations constituting the offences referred to in articles 226-4-1, 226-18 and 323-1 of the French Penal Code and article L. 163-4 of the Monetary and Financial Code, the administrative authority shall give formal notice to the person whose activity is to publish the online public communication service in question, provided that it has made available the information referred to in article 1-1 of the present law, to cease the operations constituting the offence observed. It also informs the offender of the precautionary measure referred to in the second paragraph of paragraph I of this article, and invites the offender to submit his or her observations within five days.

3. "At the same time, the administrative authority notifies the electronic address of the service concerned to Internet browser providers within the meaning of Article 2, paragraph 11 of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2022 on fair and competitive contracts in the digital sector and amending Directives (EU) 2019/1937 and (EU) 2020/1828, for the purposes of implementing precautionary measures.

4. "As a precautionary measure, the recipient of a notification shall immediately take all necessary steps to display a message warning the user of the risk of prejudice incurred in the event of access to this address. This message is clear, legible, unique and comprehensible, and enables users to access the official website of the public interest grouping for the national system to assist victims of cyber-malicious acts.

source

I'm philosophically against this idea. But on the other hand why is this being implemented in the browser? Why isn't France asking it's ISPs to block the hosting address of the sites. Or the DNS. Going after the endpoints it seems silly. Because now every single browser in the country is going to have a list of the " good websites ".

I vote sites block France.

On that note, how would one go about blocking all visitors from a geographic region?

This is how you end up with no browsers except Opera and Edge.

I'm just glad it isn't the UK proposing something this dumb. We're doing enough stupid shit as it is.

Hell no, what a fucking stupid idea

If they don't want browsers to access the site, why keeping the site open in the first place? And if only regulated people have to access it, they can just share a ssh key or something to grant access, I don't see big problems here. Am I missing something?

The article is not very clear about what exactly the proposal mandate. Create the means for browser to block websites, or forces browser to block certain websites by the geolocation they are operating in?

Because I don't understand how the later would work.

From the wording it seems like they are only asking browser developers to provide a function to block websites. (maybe byimporting a block list?)