The irony is that the French are the first ones to complain about the hegemony of sites like Google (burning tons of tax payers' money on useless projects like the Quaero search engine), but when they're given an opportunity to shoot themselves up in the foot repeatably, and to kill ANY hope of having ANY European site that EVER competes with the US then they seize on it. It's the apex of stupidity.
I'm going to write an angry mail to my French representative tonight.
What if you want the strong(er) privacy protections of the EU?
It's not that sad. There is safety in even more numbers, especially legitimate users. It's now easier than ever to spin up a Tor onion service on you own computer. While I have one I'm tinkering with on the side, surely sooner or later a service that makes easy Tor homepage (remember that word?) creation+self-hosting+sharing/linking will emerge.
> It might seem ridiculous to move a site like HN to tor, but it is ridiculous right up to the day it isn't, and then it is too late.
Also, it's the perfect model of lightweight html/css that thrives under Tor. I would ask those building Tor HTTP onion services to keep their content lightweight.
Preferably without pedos and traffickers, of course, but it's probably unavoidable that if we'd be able to do our own thing without corporate/government interference, then so would any other group. That makes this a tough problem.
Which is just about where we are right now in many countries, at the point where that coin drops collectively.
The time of running the web on the simplest paradigms (direct connection) that facilitate meddling has come to an end as any bovine lawmaker can give us impossible instructions that they do not understand themselves. It is time to assert the power of mathematics, let them stew in it a little while, let them realize they can't just shut the whole thing down anymore, and maybe in a couple generations they will have cleaned up their lawmaking act and we can try to join lawful society again. Maybe. But I expect that in time a fully torified core of sites will be considered a foundation of freedom, and not something to give up in any circumstance.