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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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Technology
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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Why?
I mean that as a genuine, serious question. Why?
I understand that Americans are raised with this as some kind of article of faith, but have you ever actually sat down and come up with a rational justification for that point of view?
There are many societies that are on all objective levels more free than tbe US, which are not absolutist on free-speech, so why do you believe that?
Because censorship eventually gets abused for oppression. It's just too slippery a slope. For an extreme example of this, you should read 1984.
I'm sorry, but that's just trite. Why does censorship, within bounds defined by a democratic decision making process, eventually get abused for oppression when so can every other right which we accept governments can control? What is UNIQUE about censorship?
ALL society is a tradeoff of rights. When you put someone in jail, you deprive them of fundamental human rights more or less by definition. Jails absolutely DO get abused for oppression. Yet we accept that for a civilised society.
Grade-school appeals to Orwell are not a good enough explanation for why freedom of speech is a unique shibboleth in US society. Particularly if "because otherwise it will be abused for oppression" in particular does not stand when your much-vaunted freedom of speech is being abused for oppression; Citizens United is exactly the kind of decision that uses free-speech absolutism to oppress.
Well, let me ask you a related question: do you think it is acceptable to ban books? Why or why not?
You mean like the books on this list? https://www.cfpublic.org/education/2024-11-11/florida-list-banned-books-schools
No, not really. But thank you for providing an excellent example; it turns out your free speech absolutism is no protection from the "slippery slope" whatsoever.
It's not censorship that's the slippery slope to oppression. It's electing demagogues that's the slippery slope to oppression, and it turns out your religious worship of the ability to be offensive to minorities not only didn't protect you, it hastened you on your journey.
I'd rather live in a country that banned Mein Kampf but doesn't threaten to shut down media that fails to praise the Dear Leader, than one that searches people's phones at the border for evidence of thought crimes while defending Elon Musk's right to spread Nazi propaganda to the hilt, tbh.