The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla’s Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.
The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla’s Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.
True… How would governments enforce dumb laws like that on open source software anyway?
Firefox is open source but it’s controlled by the Mozilla Foundation.
The steps would be
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).
What stops them from putting a blanket statement on their website stating “this software does not adhere to specific internet laws in france and therefor we do not support the use of firefox as a browser within french borders. French people can still download firefox to study the software and use it for local/offline purposes.
Firefox isn’t quite the same as facebook in that its a piece of downloadable software instead of a service website. You don’t need an account. A foreigner can travel while having firefox as the only browser on their laptop and people can still share the program between eachother.
France might create requirements for their isps to not service not adhering browsers but in any way mozzila can keep their hands clean.
Making something available when it’s not legal to do so is still a crime. Mozilla can’t put the burden of “Is this illegal?” on the downloader. On top of that, with the specific nature of this law, they’ll likely get added to this blocked list.
“For research” changes nothing, there isn’t an exception for research in the French law (as far as I know, at least).
Nothing would stop a French person from taking extra steps to circumvent the law, so it’s true that it could be gotten around with a VPN or peer-to-peer sharing of the installer, and Mozilla isn’t liable for that, but also that would still dramatically reduce Firefox installs in France. It isn’t really a good solution for Firefox to need the same steps as piracy for people to access it.
Firefox not needing user accounts isn’t that relevant, because it’s the distribution of illegal software that will be acted upon.
While it’s true that they wouldn’t necessarily have to pay a French fine, most large companies have assets in a lot of nations. For Mozilla, this could be people that translate the browser to French, who may have office space or supplies, and the French government could seize Mozilla’s French assets, which also impacts their other projects like Thunderbird.
A search tells me they do have such an office in Paris which would be threatened by their noncompliance, which does include just telling French people it’s illegal but letting them do it anyway.
Its gonna depend on specifics in the law. Is it about
a software component that allows viewing a web page.
software that is marketed as an internet browser
software that is being used to connect to the web
Many software is or can technically be used to browse the web. Thunderbird as a notable example is a mail client but is a capable of displaying any weburl. Some of the software i use on my job is capable of doing the same. Visual studio can do this. It used to be a very common feature.
The ad window when you start steam works like this and the inbuild steam Browser aside the entire steam store also functions as a locked down browser. It even shows a url bar but at least here you cant enter any url.
Depending on the law these softwares need to either comply or be excempt.
With self hosting getting popular and the trend of webapps (many of the self hosted ai apps) you dont need to be online to have a valid usecase.
If i go on holiday to France, never connect to any french internet but use a self developed browser to acces a local run webbapp am I suddenly a criminal?
If i am an open source developer workin on any of the plenty of github repos that rely or build on mozzilas open source code am i a criminal? Should GitHub be blocked because it provided acces to those repos to the french?
I do agree if mozilla has a registered company in french that those could indeed be targeted by the government but if there not surely they cant be blamed by simply ignoring foreign laws.
Piracy and porn can have wildly different laws around the world i only ever heard of countries blocking providing domains trough isps and never that far away foreign companies are supposed to take notice of local Law.
The account thing matters because this establishes a relation of client and service provider. Facebook services millions of european customers and businesses of which it actively manages data. Mozilla in contrast mostly just build a tool that any anonymous internet person can use for themselves.
Mozilla still has terms and conditions, so there’s still a relationship, and still a liability for them letting a customer misuse their browser, even if they don’t keep data on everyone.
While I absolutely agree it’s ridiculous, as I read it, it would also apply to self-hosted software and things like thunderbird that are technically a browser.
Still, I expect enforcement to really only care about “real” browsers, not one user and their own thing or someone using Thunderbird to browse the web. France (and most other governments) have shown multiple times that they don’t really look into the how they’d do these things before they try to make it law and it’d be a mess.
As per the article this post linked, this would definitely be a new precedent, browsers have never been responsible for this content, and whatever actually happens is up in the air. I’m mostly talking worst-case scenario. It’s entirely possible some other business or consumer protection law makes this unenforceable, or any number of other situations, but since the French government decides how unreasonable they’re gonna be, that’s all up to them. Maybe they crusade against Firefox, maybe they give up when they realize there’s only so much to do without drafting even more, and maybe they do go after everyone, including thunderbird or any other app that opens a webpage. Probably just ones that navigate to the illegal webpages though.
Still, a measure that’s completely defeated by a VPN, unless they add all of them to their illegal pages.
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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.
It’s hard not living in a country
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.
Why would it be mozzilas responsibility to make their website unaccesible in france rather then that being the responsibility of french isp?
If north Korea puts up an obscure law that says all sites are banned from using english does that give them grounds to sue any sites that didn’t think of blocking them specifically?
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.
They dont consider chromium based browsere a monopoly because there are over 10 different ones from different companies. The fact they are all chromium behind the scenes and all comply with google’s bullshit standards doesnt matter to them.
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.
I agree. If you give in to laws like these you have already lost; people will just accept their freedom being stripped away piece by piece, and government control of software will be the new normal. If on the other hand we reach a point where Firefox is illegal in France, it should be obvious to anyone and especially those involved in competition law that something is not right.
France is on a bad spree lately, and honestly they need all the bad publicity they can get. I hope this backfires for them.
The software can be open source, the product is branded and published.