This is exactly the description of the issue I was looking for - thank you!

This is great, thank you! Mozilla should really link to it in the petition page

> Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list

Why would this ever be done on a browser level? Any nation with internet censoring intentions can already do this by blocking it on an ISP level.

Browsers often directly provide solutions to go around such blocking (DNS over HTTPS for example, or VPNs or proxies),

The governments cannot go and forbid browsers to do that if they don't have the law to back it.

>Why would this ever be done on a browser level? Because government says so. Its signaling/actionism for political/power purposes.

> government being able to mandate that a certain website not open at all on a browser/system is uncharted territory and even the most repressive regimes in the world prefer to block websites further up the network (ISPs, etc.) so far.

Repressive government's don't do their blocking at the browser level because it is completely ineffective. Anyone who wants to access the forbidden websites will be able to do so anyway.

I think simply modifying the hosts file on a machine to "rename" the domain of the site you want to visit would be sufficient to bypass a browser-level block.

The browser must send a request with a Host header with the correct site name or the server will 404 it.

What could work is a local proxy server that translates the host name in the request.

It must MITM the https requests though.

Is MITM even possible for HSTS preloaded websites?

What we want or would end up with is a Firefox plugin to toggle a boolean.

> The browser must send a request with a Host header with the correct site name or the server will 404 it.

Only if you configured it that way. Most http servers have a "default" website which they will happly serve from if the Host header has no match. I expect these sites will continue to work just fine in firefox using the host file hack or via alternative DNS domains.

Unless they just want a foot-in-the-door law to make certain browsers illegal (to then expand on it later), blocking content at the terminal is not the way to do it. So so many ways to get around it.

Please just make the block-list a plain-text human-readable file. That way I can update the file when a new torrent website is convicted and black-listed.

I can confirm.

The French government censors websites by forcing ISPs to delist stuff from their DNS servers. It's trivial to bypass simply by setting alternative DNS providers like Cloudflare.

And not even all ISPs, only the few most popular ones. Even if that's probably 96% of internet users, that looks like the law does not treat all citizens equally.