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France orders internet providers to block access to Polymarket prediction site (www.france24.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.zip
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[+] -7 points 3 months ago (13 children)

This is the wrong way to do things. The government should not be dictating what its citizens are allowed to access on the Internet. It seems like so many countries go after ISPs and DNS providers to solve their problems for them, and I think it's mostly just laziness.

What France should be doing is making it illegal for Polymarket to operate in their country, and fining them for violations.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    And what happens when they refuse to pay the fine, or consider that those fines are an acceptable cost for doing business in France? If the goal is protecting the french public, blocking the site as soon as it is made illegal is the only option

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Control is never relinquished voluntarily, it only expands. If the government has the power to block access to one site they will do it with more, for increasingly less justifiable reasons, until they eventually don't bother justifying it at all.

    Government censorship is not permissible in a free society, period.

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  • [+] 5 points 3 months ago* (4 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

    Blocking sites that are doing something not legal to do in the country is how you do things. This isn't blocking information or anything worthwhile, just a shitty betting site that isn't allowed to do business in the way they are doing it in France.

    The move aims to enforce an existing ban on financial transactions to the site.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    This isn't blocking information or anything worthwhile

    The government should neither know nor care what its citizens access on the internet, any more than they should have control over what books its citizens read.

    Censorship is censorship regardless of what is being censored.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I think it's the nature of the site, in that anyone really determined can create a result they've bet upon.

    Like someone dying or an industrial "accident" happening. It's about the potential for abuse, insider trading or any host of seemingly random events that may not be so random.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    I have no objection to sites like Polymarket being made illegal. That is not the argument.

    I don't approve of people using Polymarket, but I would fight for their right to access the website without censorship.

    The government can declare a business like Polymarket to be illegal, that's fine. Take action against Polymarket directly. The government dictating which sites a citizen can or cannot access is not fine. It is exactly the same as what China does with the Great Firewall.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    That's fair. I fear it's just a matter of time before something realy awful hits and there were bets placed on it and yeah, it is discovered after the fact that the bettors were involved and that will be the end of all of it. Which.. doesn't bother me one bit if we're being honest about it. I'm not one to give a shit about gambling. IMHO, it's a massive waste of time and money.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago

    No, that's not, or at least shouldn't be and used to not be, "how you do things". Blocking websites because they aren't complying with national laws used to be the domain of authoritarian countries like the PRC or Thailand or Russia. Now it's "how you do things" in so called liberal democracies? Has that really become so normalized?

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