France presents its plan to “secure” the Internet

The Internet has never been a space of lawlessness, but the main difficulty, for several decades, has been to enforce it. In order to “secure and regulate the digital space”, the government of Elisabeth Borne has just added its stone to the building with a bill presented on Wednesday May 10 by the Minister for the Digital Transition, Jean-Noël Barrot.

Originally a simple transposition formality the European Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act regulations, this text inscribes in the stone of French law many principles validated in Brussels: from the prohibition for digital platforms to favor their own services to the prohibition of advertising targeted at minors, through the obligations of transparency in to fight misinformation.

But what could be called the “Barrot law”, if it is adopted in Parliament, has especially been enriched with several online security devices. Review of what’s new.

Sanctions against ographic sites accessible to those under 18

In the long balance of power that pits it against the publishers of adult content sites that are too easy to access on the Internet, the regulator will no longer bother with preliminaries: the government bill intends to give Arcom the power to block sites that do not seriously verify the age of Internet users who visit them in order to reject minors. “At twelve, a third of our children have already been exposed to ographic content, which has very serious consequences for their long-term emotional development,” notes Jean-Noël Barrot.

Until now, the procedure provided for a formal notice and then the intervention of a judge. While a first case started at the end of 2021 against the champions of the sector hub and Xvideos will be the subject of a court decision next July, Arcom will be able to go faster with the new law. The adversarial principle will be deemed respected if the authority discusses its doubts twice with suspect sites. Concretely, a blockage will mean that the incriminated sites will no longer be accessible for customers of the Internet services of the telecom operators, except by using a private network (VPN).

An automatic alert against malicious sites and SMS scams

The new law will also require telecom operators to warn their customers of the risks of consulting a whole list of websites considered dangerous by specialized services within the State (ComCyberGend, Anssi, AMF, etc.). Similarly, senders of SMS vectors of scams or data extortion attempts will be branded with a hot iron.

Called “anti-scam filter” in Emmanuel Macron’s electoral program in 2022, this device should see the light of day in 2024 with a trial version from the end of next summer. But the work has probably not started, even if each operator has technologies. According to the Ministry of Digital Transition, a discussion is underway to remunerate their role as technical provider of the anti-scam filter.

No less than 18 million French people were victims of cybercrime last year. Half of them lost money. But specialists warn of the difficulty there will be in keeping the list of dangerous sites up to date, while cybercriminals change their tune several times a day.

Toughness against child ography

In the eyes of the law, it will be just as serious to leave terrorist content online as a child ography image. Website publishers, including social networks and forums on which Internet users express themselves directly, will now have 24 hours to remove reported child ography content. In the event of failure, they will be exposed to 250,000 euros in fines and one year’s imprisonment for their legal representative. Last year, 74,000 requests of this type were made in France.

Social media ban for cyberstalkers

After storming against online hatred, the government is attacking repeat offenders. The new law provides for giving the possibility to the judge to suspend for six months, or even a year, access to social networks of a person convicted of cyberbullying, child ography, negationism, apology for terrorism or dissemination of violent images.

Even if the Internet user will always be able to create a new account in a few clicks, the measure will at least temporarily remove him from the community of other users who are often complicit in real “raids” against people.

The end of cloud transfer fees

On this point, France is not waiting for European texts to act. While a Data Act is being prepared in Brussels for entry into force in 2026, the government already intends to ban the transfer fees the dominant cloud computing platforms on the market (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc.) when their customers want to switch to a competitor, on the pretext that they are using bandwidth to transmit their data.

Other costs of the same type will however remain authorized, in particular migration and interoperability costs. On the other hand, the practice of commercial credits – these subsidies granted to new customers – will now have to be limited in time.