PARIS—Assemblée Nationale, France's lower house of parliament, voted through a new digital bill intended to overhaul the internet and the country's digital space.
According to an English language edition of Le Monde, the debate among the lower house lasted from October 4 to a final vote on Tuesday, October 17.
The Sénat, the upper house of parliament, voted unanimously to adopt "the bill aiming to secure and regulate the digital space."
It is shortened to the acronym SREN, based on the title of the bill in native French. A broad coalition of the parties supported President Emmanuel Macron and his center-right coalition government to pass the bill.
On a vote split 360 to 77, the Les Républicains and the Parti socialiste center-left parties secured the bill's passage.
La France Insoumise, a hard-left populist party, chose to vote against the law, referring to the bill as a "mess," reports The Connexion.
Communists, Greens and the members of Marine Le Pen's National Rally right-wing party abstained. However, those parties also called the online safety bill a "shameful text," per the same report.
The law is similar to the United Kingdom's Online Safety Bill in its mandate to levy age verification rules on adult websites. The French bill now allows national digital regulator Arcom to exercise police power to block adult sites without review from the French courts.
Junior Digital Transformation Minister Jean-Noël Barrot was the lead member of the government to push this law.
Now that the law is through the entire parliament, it is expected that the bill will receive final markups and become law.
France's government has recently cracked down on pornography. For example, the High Council for Equality Between Women and Men recommended that all adult content should be criminalized entirely.
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