Censorship

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La Quadrature du Net fights for an Internet where everyone can decide which rules shape our exchanges. It refuses that these rules are set by a handful of private companies or applied automatically. La Quadrature du Net fights to prevent governments from censoring us authoritatively, especially for political ends.

Anti-terrorism Censorship Regulation

A new European Regulation uses the pretext of anti-terrorism to impose heavy requirements on hosting service providers, notably to remove content within one hour when notified by the police. It normalises private censorship and bypassing courts. It makes “automatic filtering” the fulcrum of censorship policy. It will make the decentralised web disappear by putting it under the thumb of a handful of giants, who will be the biggest and only winners. Sea our campaign page.

  • Our litigation against the regulation (November 2023)
  • Our article about the adoption of the regulation by the LIBE comitee (January 2021)
  • article before the vote of the LIBE comitee (January 2021)
  • Our article about the adoption ofthe Regulation on online “terrorist content” censorship by the European parliament (June 2019)
  • Our article to ask citizens to continue to call MEPs after the vote in LIBE was postponed (April 2019)
  • Our analysis about the vote of the text in CULT comittee (March 2019)
  • Our analysis about the vote of the text in IMCO comittee (March 2019)
  • Our analysis about the report from D. Dalton, text’s rapporteur for LIBE comittee (January 2019)
  • Our reaction to the agreement of the european governments about the Regulation (December 2018)
  • Common letter with more than fifty organisations’support, to ask to give up the Regulation project (December 2018)
  • Our analysis about the way this regulation will destroy end-to-end encryption (November 2018)
  • Analysis from the negociations during the first two months (November 2018)
  • Our reaction to the project’s publication (September 2018)
  • The European Commission’s project (September 2018)

Interoperability and Internet regulation

La Quadrature du Net is fighting to decentralise the Web and to question the attention economy imposed by certain giants. Along this line, it participates to the wider debate on how the liability and protection of hosting providers should evolve.

  • Our article “European Union must impose interoperability on Web Giants” (September 2020)
  • Our open letter about interoperability(June 2019)
  • article of Laurent Chemla (October 2018) – FR
  • “An elephant isn’t just a mouse, only bigger”, article of Benjamin Bayart (October 2018) – FR
  • “Some responsibilities for the Web giants?”, article of Arthur (October 2018)
  • “The copyright directive is not a loss for a free, open Internet”, article of Calimaq (September 2018) – FR
  • Our first ideas on how to regulate the Internet through decentralisation (September 2018)
  • “YouTube: invisibilisation for the sake of advertising”, article of Okhin (April 2017)
  • “On Facebook, militants and anti-racists are censored”, article of Félix Tréguer (September 2016)
  • Our very first thoughts on the notion of “Displayers” (September 2015)

French Avia Law

  • The Avia Law partially censored (October 2020)
  • Our second article (September 2020)
  • Our first article about the French “Avia Law” on online hate speech (July 2019)

European Union is on its way to adopt a new directive imposing automatic censorship to the large platforms that classify the content they broadcast. Not only does this text sanctifies global and mass surveillance as invented by Web giants, it also forces the cultural economy and the press to adopt advertising as their business model and to rely on a broad violation of our privacy.

  • A summary of our position about this Copyright directive (mars 2019)
  • Our condemnation of the adoption of the text by the Parliament (September 2018)
  • “The fake confrontation between the two heads of informational capitalism”, article of Félix Tréguer in Le Monde (September 2018) – FR
  • We decrypt the text as the European Parliament vote approaches (June 2018)
  • Our analysis after a year of debate (September 2017)
  • Our complete analysis against the directive (March 2017)
  • The proposed directive published by the European Commission (September 2016)
  • Our first analysis of the proposed text (September 2016)
  • Our proposals for positive copyright reform (August 2012)

Fake News

Taking up the grotesque idea that the State can separate what’s real from “Fake”, the French government has gotten bogged down in a risky attempt to make itself the judge of truth online. La Quadrature du Net sees this attempt above all as a way of concealing that the government lacks a general strategy for the digital world. For the moment we therefore devote little attention to it.

  • Our contribution to the European Commission’s consultations on the subject (March 2018)
  • Our reaction to the French government’s proposals (January 2018)

Administrative censorship

French law allows the police to require hosting services providers, search engines and Internet providers to censor content they consider as promoting terrorism or child pornography, without authorisation from a judge. La Quadrature du Net has opposed this in Parliament and before the judges.

  • Our litigation against the French government’s censorship of TikTok in New Caledonia (May 2024)
  • Our reaction to Indymedia being censored in the name of antiterrorism (September 2017)
    Launching our second action against the text before the Conseil d’Etat, with FFDN and FDN (December 2016) – FR
  • Exégètes amateurs’ analysis of the Orange bug which exposed massive surveillance related to censorship measures (October 2016) – FR
  • First setback before the Conseil d’Etat (February 2016) – FR
  • First action against the text before the Conseil d’Etat, with FFDN and FDN (March 2015) – FR
  • New article 6-1 from the a French Law providing for censorship (November 2014) and its implenting decrees on blocking (February) and delinking (March 2015) – FR
  • Final appeal (not heard) to Parliament to oppose the bill (October 2014)
  • Our analysis and proposals to amend it (October 2014)
  • Our reaction to the bill’s publication (July 2014)

HADOPI/ACTA

Since its creation in 2008, La Quadrature du Net fought actively against the French HADOPI law (three-strike law), presented during the N. Sarkozy presidency to repress sharing cultural works on peer-to-peer networks. For over two years, we were witness of the corruption of the political decision-making process. We saw the indue influence of the cultural industries on this bill that allowed an administrative authority to block a family’s Internet access. We succeeded in taking down the most repressive version of this mechanism.
From 2010 onwards, we have also focused our efforts on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). After a historically strong rallying of activists accross Europe, from Internet activists to associations fighting the pharmaceutical and food industries, the European Parliament voted to end this criminal agreement in July 2012. During these battles, we defended a different vision of culture in the digital age, built on sharing knowledge and art, and we made proposals on how to reform cultural policies especially regarding the legalisation of non-commercial sharing.