The text is eagerly awaited by the deputies. This Wednesday, the bill aimed at securing the internet will arrive at the National Assembly. Previously adopted by the Senate, it also transcribes into French law the new European regulations on digital technology. Here are its main measures.
“Who has never received a text message trying to extort information from you to access your personal training account or health insurance?” The Minister for Digital Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot wants to implement Emmanuel Macron’s promise of a free anti-scam filter sending a warning message to anyone who is about to go to a site identified as malicious.
Secondly, this system may result in the administrative blocking of the implemented website. The measure will involve establishing a list of these fraudulent sites and agreements with “internet access operators and web browser publishers”.
The European Regulation on Digital Services (DSA), transcribed in the bill, already includes measures aimed at curbing cyberharassment on large digital platforms, by forcing them to remove accounts that are reported to them. But the government wants to go further and accompany this measure with a banishment sentence. Concretely, the judge may ask a social network to prevent for a period of six months – one year in the event of a repeat offense – the re-registration of a person already convicted of cyberharassment.
The debates in committee in the Assembly were also an opportunity to add a provision tending to generalize the attribution of a “digital identity” to everyone, with the objective assumed by part of the majority of facilitating the lifting of anonymity on the internet. MEPs also approved in committee the creation of a fixed fine for offenses contesting crimes against humanity, defamation and racist insults or committed because of sex or sexual orientation, in the digital space.
The government will entrust the Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom) with the power to order, without the assistance of a judge, the blocking by telecom operators and the delisting of pornographic sites which do not prevent minors to access their content. The government is thus taking up a measure proposed by four senators in a recent report on the abuses of this industry.
Arcom agents may also be sworn in to report infractions.
The text also gives Arcom the power to stop the broadcasting on the internet of media banned in the European Union. The measure particularly targets non-European streaming sites like Odysee or Rumble, which had broadcast the pro-Russian channels Russia Today and Sputnik despite their ban in the EU as part of the sanctions taken after the invasion of Ukraine.
At the minister’s request, Odysee stopped broadcasting the channels and Rumble closed its service to French Internet users.
A more economical measure and inspired by the work of parliamentarians, the government wants to allow companies to “change much more easily” IT infrastructure and service providers, also called cloud operators. The sector is dominated by American players AWS (Amazon subsidiary), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
The text plans in particular to allow “portability” of data between the services of these different companies and limits the use of “cloud credits”, free purchase vouchers today used by players to build customer loyalty.
During the examination of the text, the Senate added a legislative component concerning the regulation of games with monetizable digital objects (Jonum), removing the authorization to legislate by ordinance provided for by the government. The text offers a first legal definition of their specificities, between games of money and chance on the one hand and video games on the other.
The Senate authorized the creation of Jonum on an experimental basis for a period of three years, while supervising it to ensure the protection of minors and to guard against the risks of misused creation of online casinos.