France Flirts with ISP-Level Censorship

PARIS—The French are about to break the world’s heart. The country known for its love of all things sexy is on the verge of passing legislation that will filter internet traffic, ostensibly with the goal of preventing images of child sexual abuse from getting through.

“The bill is a mishmash of unrelated measures, boosting the amount the police spend on ‘security,’ multiplying penalties for counterfeiting checks or credit cards, increasing use of CCTV cameras, extending access to the police national DNA database and authorizing the seizure of vehicles driven without a license,” reported PCWorld. “Among the measures dealing with the internet, it seeks to criminalize online identity theft, allow police to tap internet connections as well as phone lines during investigations, and target child pornography by ordering ISPs to filter Internet connections.”

Critics of the new law are concerned that sites that do not contain illegal content will be filtered out inadvertently and also that the list of filtered content will grow once the ability to do so is in place, something the French president has indicated he would consider supporting.

“French President Nicolas Sarkozy has already made it clear that he would like to see ISPs play a far greater role in clamping down on the Internet,” wrote Nate Anderson for Ars Technica. “In a January speech in which Sarkozy styled himself a ‘patron’ of the French arts, he praised the new ‘three strikes’ law his administration championed (and passed into law last year).”

"The more we automatically 'depollute' networks and servers from all sources of piracy, the less it will be necessary to resort to measures imposed on the 'Internautes' [French Internet users],” Sarkosy said. “We must therefore try, without delay, filtering devices."

According to Anderson, France “will now have one of the toughest censorship regimes of any robust democracy in the Western hemisphere—though Australia is giving France a good run for its money on the worldwide stage.”

And let’s not forget about China or Iran, two governments that continue to flaunt their roles as enemies of free speech. Without a democratic process hampering the oppression of their citizenry, they would seem to enjoy an advantage as the World Censorship Olympics continue on unabated.

As George Orwell so intuitively knew, however, a democracy hell bent upon the suppression of its own people can quickly and ably leapfrog past even the most violent and totalitarian of regimes.