France mulls new ‘frontline’ digital bill going beyond EU rules
A new legislative initiative is being discussed in Paris that would implement landmark EU legislation but also introduce new proposals on digital fraud, online harassment, child protection, media bans, and cloud switching.
The proposal is presented to the Council of Ministers on Wednesday (10 May) by the Minister of Digital Transition and Telecommunications Jean-Noël Barrot.
The bill includes the implementation provisions for the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, combined with cross-party proposals on the protection of minors from accessing online pornography, and fostering digital sovereignty.
Barrot stressed that this new bill has been written so that it is in line with the current regulation of social media influencers.
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The legislative initiative, he said, aims “to protect our citizens, our children, our businesses and our democracy”.
Digital frauds
The digital minister has suggested introducing an anti-scam filter to fight against “mafias without honour, who […] have made our tablets and smartphones their new territory for racketeering”.
This filter should prevent, among other things, online fraud, such as a recent case of scams targeting the Professional Training Account in France. According to the government, 18 million French were victims of cybercrime in 2022, half of which resulted in a monetary loss.
Online harassment
Citing the example of a physical ban from football stadiums for illegal behaviour, Barrot wishes to empower judges to slap extensive social media bans on those “leading the pack” in what he dubbed online “harassment raids”.
The proposal envisages a ban for up to six months, extended to one year for repeat offenders.
Age verification
It also wishes to license the French authority regulating audio-visual and digital communication (Arcom) to de-index pornographic websites that fall short of putting in place a new age verification requirement.
“By the age of 12, one-third of our children have already been exposed [to pornographic content], with very serious consequences for their personal growth,” Barrot said. He added in an interview with Europe 1, a French radio broadcaster, that “our children are the main victims of the digital society”.
In addition, hosting companies that fail to de-index child sexual abuse material within a 24-hour period following an alert from police services would risk a €250,000 fine. This provision applies “on the same sanction template that applies to the non-removal of terrorist content”.
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Cloud switching
Another element of the ambitious draft law aims at removing obstacles for customers to change cloud service providers.
The fees for transferring data from one cloud provider to another will be forbidden when it comes to costs related to the use of the bandwidth, and the fees will be regulated when it comes to technical operations necessary for the transfer of digital assets.
The measure is meant to promote competition among cloud services, in particular, to give French cloud champions like OVH the possibility to compete with American hyperscalers like Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS.
At the same time, it significantly overlaps with a similar provision included in the EU Data Act intended to force cloud incumbents to drop the switching costs and ensure that the website or app has roughly the same functionalities with the new provider.
According to a French official, the government decided to anticipate the EU Data Act due to the enormous economic stakes of the cloud sector.
“At the moment, the market is growing by 20% per year. [Yet], the three main suppliers account for three-quarters of the market. So, the anti-competitive practices of these companies are preventing a new, more open economy from flourishing,” the French official added, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Media ban
Barrot also wishes to empower Arcom, the French media regulator, to suspend access to websites struck by EU sanctions, explicitly referring to Moscow-affiliated outlets Russia Today France and Sputnik.
These media outlets were banned at the outset of Russia’s aggression on Ukraine as they were deemed the mouthpiece of the Kremlin, but they managed to circumvent the economic sanctions for months.
For the digital minister, the intent is to give Arcom the capacity “to effectively and quickly counter propaganda by the enemies of democracy”.
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Implementing EU regulation
The bill designated Arcom as the digital services coordinator, the national authority that will enforce the Digital Services Act and be responsible for overseeing the compliance of digital companies based in France.
For the Digital Markets Act, the enforcement is more complex, as the lion’s share of the EU rulebook for Big Tech companies will be with the European Commission.
On the French side, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL), a privacy regulator, will support everything related to data protection, while the Directorate-General for Competition, Consumer Affairs, and Fraud Control will be responsible for overseeing marketplaces, and the Arcom for platform content.
As for the Data Governance Act, a regulation defining the conditions for sharing industrial data, the competent authorities will be the CNIL for data donated in the public interest, the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) for public data, and the telecom authority Arcep on topics of the data economy and data intermediaries.
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