[HN] Will Browsers Be Required by Law to Stop You from Visiting Infringing Sites?

I'm imagining Firefox creating a clientside file called government-blocklist.txt, with the understanding of "don't touch this file, you scamp 😉"

ainsi mieux protéger nos enfants

This is to protect our children of course.

As usual, so anyone who is against this law can be depicted as someone who is supporting pedopornography.

Should cars be required by law not to let you drive to drug deals? Should glasses be required by law not to let you read banned books? Should testicles be required by law not to produce government-unsanctioned sperm?

how to get all browsers to remove access for france

This is dumb on so many levels. It'd be trivial for people to obtain a web browser that ignores this. The biggest browsers in the world all have open-source code bases, so anybody could build something with near feature parity but none of the restrictions, and then distribute it wherever. Enforcing this would be just create another game of wack-a-mole, with no advantages for the copyright holders, and potential abuse against even non-pirate users. Very slippery slope.

The most stupid part of this idea is that is requires a list of banned sites to be served to every user.

Even if they would use hashing to obfuscate the banned domains, you can download a list of all registered domains and just test every one of them.

So the average internet user will lose freedom while a cheese pizza enjoyer with some computer knowledge will gain a list of every banned CP site.

The laws already require you to not infringe copyright. This is a new front in the same old war.

If the reason for this is to prevent pedophilia content, then this will do nothing. People who access that sort of thing on the dark web aren't going to be affected by this whatsoever.

Browsers are open source

There's literally no way to enforce this.

It’s astonishing how much liberty they are being able to remove from us in sake of “security”.

why govts love to censor the public internet?

France and dystopian copyright laws, name a more typical duo.

If google implements is drm technology they are actively implementing already now, the answer is an absolute yes.

Download firefox now.

Service providers in many countries are required by law to do this through DNS for years. The UK, Italy, Germany and Brazil are just a few that I've had personal experience with. Moving this to the browser really isn't necessary since there will always be easy ways around these types of blocks.

How would this even be enforced?

How would this stop anything, though? Most of the scam sites are one-off things and people call the numbers and are redirected to otherwise legit screen-sharing software to be scammed.

I can't think of a single specific site that any government could block to stop scams. This shit is just bound to be abused.

Despite all the problems we have in the United States, this would be struck down in court SO fast due to the first amendment to our constitution. The government making a list of speech you are not allowed to hear is pretty much the most cut and dry violation of that.

And what happens when I remove that & compile my browser from source?

Eh, it's unenforceable. Just theater from a bunch of politicians that don't understand the technology. I wouldn't worry about it.

What about tor

Good luck trying to enforce that.