Like many politicians, the french president and his government have no technical/scientific knowledge and it shows.
Translation from usine-digitale.fr
The government intends to “secure the digital space”, in the broad sense. Even very wide. The bill presented this Wednesday, May 10 in the Council of Ministers, “aimed at securing and regulating the digital space”, aggregates measures already announced and creates new ones in a catch-all text, intended to fight both against online attacks, scams targeting consumers, disinformation, content accessible to minors and anti-competitive practices in the field of the cloud.
Measures already announced
The creation of the “anti-scam filter”, Emmanuel Macron’s campaign promise, is integrated into the bill. This device must allow Internet users, on desktop or mobile computers, to be alerted when they are about to visit a malicious site. For this, the various administrative authorities, as well as the reports of Internet users, will feed a shared database that will serve as a blacklist.
Web browsers will be used, as well as telecom operators to block sites at the DNS server level. Discussions are still ongoing regarding compensation for Internet service providers for filtering (as they had obtained after a long struggle in the fight against piracy).
Another measure already mentioned, the blocking by Arcom of pornographic sites that will not set up a robust system of verification of the age of users. The government had announced in March an experiment with a system of verification in “double anonymity”, which consists of going through a trusted third party to act as an intermediary between the pornographic site and the identity verification provider, in order to preserve the anonymity of users. A solution that satisfied the CNIL, but remember that there is still no official technical reference for adult sites, to allow them to ensure that they are in compliance.
In any case, the bill provides for blocking, delisting and fines against sites that do not apply the future repository, as well as a fine of 250,000 euros and a maximum prison sentence of one year for hosts who do not remove content deemed problematic in less than 24 hours.
The new measures
The new measures include the temporary ban from social networks targeting people convicted of cyber-harassment and incitement to hatred online, for any reason. This penalty, pronounced by a judge, will be six months and one year in the event of a repeat offence. Social networks that do not apply them will be liable to a fine of 75,000 euros. Jean-Noël Barrot explains that he wants to "put an end to the feeling of impunity" enjoyed by the perpetrators of cyber-harassment, behavior that particularly affects women on the Internet.
The government will also take advantage of this bill to regulate online games based on the blockchain, with a view to protecting minors, on the one hand, and strengthening the fight against money laundering on the other hand, he explained.
Data portability in the cloud
Unrelated to the rest of the articles of this bill, but in the spirit of protecting companies, the text introduces the regulation of costs related to migration between cloud providers. The government wants to introduce some kind of right to data portability in the cloud, and to do so intends to prohibit “transfer fees”, a practice of hyperscalers consisting of charging a high price for the transfer of data from one service to another. Migration costs, corresponding to technical operations related to this portability, will be regulated. The Minister Delegate for Digital Transition wishes to "put an end to the law of the strongest".
Finally, the bill is aimed at local authorities by creating a single database to list the activity of furnished tourist accommodation, in order to help them enforce the limitation to 120 nights per year for AirBnb-type rentals. It also introduces the administrative blocking of websites contributing to disinformation, when content has been banned from distribution (such as those of RT France and Sputnik).