

What the French 'Civilised Internet' Looks Like - error
http://lozkayepirate.tumblr.com/day/2011/06/20

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madmaze
If this becomes reality it will seriously set back the value of the internet,
its freedom of speech and privacy. It doesnt matter that it is "just" one
country. Its a western country and this mindset of censorship and control by
such a government worries me. Alot.

~~~
nextparadigms
This would set a very bad precedent indeed, as other countries will later
point to France as an example of how it should be done.

Sarkozy wanted to get all the G8 countries on the same page, so they don't
look out of place with their new censorship laws. That way if they all enforce
the same kind of laws in the same time, they think people would just take it
for granted that that's how it should be done, and that "if so many countries
are doing it, then it probably makes sense".

People need to speak out against such measures and be very vocal about it.
Fortunately, there are elections next spring in France, so I hope the French
people will vote Sarkozy down over this, and put someone in his place that
disagrees with such censorship.

Americans also have an election next year, and hopefully they'll do the same
(Ron Paul?).

~~~
dmitri1981
> Fortunately, there are elections next spring

I would say you are mistaken in the belief that these policies exist because
of certain leaders. In my opinion, they exist because the electorate is
misguided in believing that this kind of 'censorship' is a good idea.
Therefore, I would suggest that voting out the incumbent will not necessarily
make the problem go away. I believe that the best way to deal with this is by
spreading the counter message to show just how foolish and misguided the
policies are. In addition, you should write to your government representative
and let them know how you feel, ideally providing some good justifications for
your argument.

~~~
roc
> _"In my opinion, they exist because the electorate is misguided in believing
> that this kind of 'censorship' is a good idea."_

Or, a bit more cynically, they're paid to believe this kind of 'censorship' is
a good idea.

~~~
dmitri1981
A slight misunderstanding perhaps. By electorate I mean the general public who
elect the politicians. As far as I know they don't get paid to have opinions,
unlike some politicians in a few cases.

~~~
roc
Huh. Well it wasn't a misunderstanding. I just _completely_ missed what you'd
written and read my own bias right into your comment.

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Wilya
(I'm French)

As explained in the source article on PCInpact, the proposed project has been
assessed by the CNN, which is a (relatively new) consultative committee whose
members include representatives from ISPs, high traffic French websites
(dailymotion, meetic and deezer are on the list), a few software editors,
representatives from ecommerce sellers, etc (and no music/film industry
representative, for once).

Unsurprisingly, they argued against it (one of arguments is 'the EU has to be
informed', which is an interesting trick to gain a few months, imo). (Can't
find any non-French source for that, but it has been officially done).

What's more surprising is that they were officially asked what they thought
about it in the first place. I don't think the government had any incentive to
do so. What were they thinking ?

If they have any respect for the CNN (which the president created just two
months ago), they will forget the law. Otherwise, they will have explicitly
ignored the opinion of the ISPs. Which isn't very wise when you want to
enforce filtering and blocking of websites.

This doesn't makes sense to me.

~~~
danielharan
Maybe they look like tough protectors and win with their core constituency
even if the CNN tells them it's impossible to enforce or implement.

Sarko is a cagey motherfucker.

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csomar
Am I missing some point here? When Internet was censored in Tunisia, we would
use proxies, https, sites like vtunnels... This became casual stuff even for
the non-techie. So what's the point of censorship? Making access to the web a
little bit harder? If you censor a video on Youtube, someone else can upload
it to Facebook and watch it through HTTPS and diffuse it to many people.

Aren't (the French Gov. and other Govs.) aware of that? If so, what's the
point of censorship?

~~~
JonnieCache
_> Aren't (the French Gov. and other Govs.) aware of that? If so, what's the
point of censorship?_

To win votes by making the population feel safe, and to funnel taxpayers'
money into the pockets of dubious whitehat contractors.

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jbrennan
It sets a bad precedent, and unfortunately it's not the only country to do so
(or consider it). When I was younger, I had always dreamed of living briefly
in France or maybe Australia at some point in my life, but both countries now
see to either enforce strict censorship, or are on the verge of doing so.

I live in Canada, and it wouldn't shock me if our Conservative government did
the same, but it still saddens me nonetheless.

I don't keep up on French politics/culture very much, but this move does
surprise me, given their Revolutionary history.

~~~
nextparadigms
That revolutionary history was quite a long time ago. France has a pretty
conservative culture right now.

~~~
yardie
They are into their 5th republic so the revolution wasn't that long ago.

The student protestors from the 60s are now retired or (even worse) running
the government and they are the ones voting on these laws. Unfortunately,
Sarkozy is far more popular than I would like him to be and his biggest
political rival is sitting in NYC under house arrest.

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iampims
As a french citizen living in the US, I’m sad to hear that the French
government is proving itself even more ridicule than it already was. Sad.

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ErrantX
The French government has been going this way for a while now.. they also tend
play heavily on the "think of the children" emotion which annoys me.

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atakan_gurkan
This sounds similar to the recently proposed measures by the Turkish
government. Perhaps French will develop and vulgarize some tools that would
also be useful in Turkey and vice versa. I think the first is more likely
since the Turkish population is less tech-savvy and more importantly a lot
less sensitive to the erosion of democratic rights.

For the record, I am Turkish but has been living abroad for 12 of the last 13
years (planning to go back next month!). Ironically, even though I think this
is a terrible law, I hope it passes and adequate countermeasures get
developed.

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Chris_Dollar
Yes, many citizen groups stand up for the 1st Amendment and tell our
representatives that Internet censorship is not feasible in a functioning
democracy. The problem is that the Big Six (GE, News Corp., Disney, Time
Warner, Viacom, & CBS) have a megaphone and bags of cash... so often the
voices of the citizen groups get drowned out.

Couple that with the fact that the vast majority Americans form their world
view from the television or the websites that the Big Six own. Sex scandals
and Hollywood gossip is discussed, Internet censorship? Not so much.

And this is increasingly not just an American problem, as many people on this
thread are pointing out. We live in a global society (thanks largely to the
Internet), the challenges of the U.S. are increasingly the challenges of
France.

The Internet has done a tremendous amount of good over the past 20+ years, but
there is a flip side to this coin as well.

Check out this five minute documentary trailer (on KickStarter) that seeks to
tackle some of these Internet censorship issues:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-
docum...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-documentary-
film?ref=live)

This documentary project is looking to get crowd-funded by small individual
donations from the same citizens with the most to lose if we moved to a
censored and centralized Internet.

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gorog
VPN will become the norm. Internet access will be 30€ for the ISP + 5 € for
the VPN. Not that much of a big deal for the citizen, more worrying for Paris
as a tech scene.

~~~
maurits
Interesting package deal, as the French also have a pretty stringent anti
piracy law.

Other side effect, assuming that the VPN is fully encrypted and the server is
in a, shall we say more liberal country, is that it will become more easy to
pirate things for the average user.

~~~
yardie
There anti-piracy is more bark than anything. They basically wrote a law with
little understanding of its implementation and are trying to push the cost of
doing it onto the ISPs who scoffed at the idea (well Free, AFAIK).

Basically they want you to download and install some software on your PC to
monitor you for piracy, to prove you're innocent. If you don't install it? You
have to prove your innocent without the big brother software. Also, its
Windows only. Mac, Unix, Linux are on their own.

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pnathan
So this is what the West is tottering towards.

What can be done about it? Does an alternative internetwork need to be formed?
What will it look like? How will we pay for an alternative network? Who will
use it?

For those of us who really, honestly, no-kidding want free speech: what can be
done from a technical angle? Thoughts?

~~~
bh42222
Tor. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29>

Obviously you will be intimidated by the government if you run an exit node,
or perhaps any tor node at all. If you're an academic with tenure, or
independently wealthy go for it.

If you need to work for a living and do not have tenure, well perhaps consider
helping others run tor. Or start a non-profit with the goal to promote
freedom, and raise funds, and pay to install public tor terminals anywhere
that's willing to host them.

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greencircle
Intel cut France out of their map of Europe (supposedly) when France
restricted encryption tech. They want a repeat.

I love the double speak about undermining the public good.

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symstym
This brings to mind A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, by John
Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the EFF:

<https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>

It was written in 1996 but feels more relevant as every year goes by.

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cbailey
Similar to how the DoHS is seizing domains, and their screwup that resulted in
84,000 wrongly seized domains.

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sambeau
France has borders with Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy,
Monaco, Spain and Andorra. Plus Britain just across a channel (and connected
by a tunnel).

I can't see how they could possibly achieve this.

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JTfor2032
I have never quite liked Sarkozy

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petervandijck
"What" it looks like, what. Not how.

