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Sign our petition to stop France from forcing browsers like Mozilla's Firefox to censor websites
(foundation.mozilla.org)
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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True... How would governments enforce dumb laws like that on open source software anyway?
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.
Sad as it is, I think this is the optimal solution when it goes through. A lot of EU countries are against monopolies (France is not an exception), this way they would realize they are enforcing a monopoly and singular dependency.
Unless every browser ignores them. Then what they’re going to fine Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla and declare the internet illegal in France?
It just seems so absurd I can’t take it seriously. There’s zero way to make this actually work. If they want to ban websites they’d have to go full China on it.