A counter view:

#JustDemocracyThings

As with DNS blocks and other such nonsense, it would be trivially easy for any motivated person to sidestep this kind of control. As long as someone – anyone – is out there offering a browser without these restrictions, all the user needs to do is download and install it. It wouldn’t require a great degree of technical skill, time, or effort.

Whenever a scheme like this is proposed, we obviously have to balance the benefits against the drawbacks. This article (and Mozilla’s statement) make the drawbacks very clear, and they seem significant enough to me on their own. But given the above fact of easy circumvention, I would question whether the supposed benefits really exist in the first place, or if it’s just ignorance and wishful thinking (at best).

I think what’s so unfortunate about the problems that this bill is attempting to address (reducing scams, cyber-bullying, CSAM distribution, etc.) is that they are complex problems, and like most complex problems they require complex solutions.

But politicians don’t like complex solutions because they’re harder to sell to voters, and easier for political opponents to pick apart. It’s tempting to say that bills like this are based purely on ignorance, but while that almost certainly plays a part in how these bills keep getting proposed, I don’t think it’s the full story.

We frequently have experts and other community stakeholders (Mozilla in this case) advising governments on the problems with their proposed bills, and frustratingly, that advice seems to be ignored more often than not. Despite being given the facts, they push forward with unhelpful or even dangerous legislation because, I suspect, they are more interested in scoring political points than they are at actually solving problems.

Sadly, I think this problem of politics is itself a complex one and without any simple solutions, either.

I think the best we can do is voice our opposition to bad ideas loudly enough that the voting public is convinced. Trying to convince the legislators themselves that their own proposed legislation is problematic often seems like a fool’s errand to me. SOPA (just for example) wasn’t scrapped because politicians suddenly started listening to experts, but rather because Google et. al. shone a massive spotlight on it and turned voters against it.

And I think this poster over there is right, grosso modo. It would be a different thing if such capability is combined with another thing EU politicians would like to implement: EU-ID.

This is a can of worms as it means ALL your data is online, in government hands. Combine it with a CO2 budget, and you can see where this goes.

So, ISP can still sell it's shit without any problem, totally innocent. However, to make use of their services, the rules governing the use of services are amended such that every time you want to go online, or once a week or something, you need to re-establish your identity. This will ensure, you use access-point controlled by Corporate Law/ public Law. And of course, you agreed.

From another perspective: KYC is alrready automated to the hilt. All it needs is the implementation of the measures at the ISP-level.

The rest is window dressing and trial balloons to measure response.

It may be that Elons satellites may be a counter balance. Off-line preservation of things you like is a thing worth considering.

And perhaps, it is time to cherish what was entrusted to paper ... books.

The same governments that have been trying to shut down (Ahoy me laddies) for 20 years?

Safety = less freedom when it comes to government.

In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability …

Problem, Reaction, Solution.