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Comment by ls612 | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla’s executives don’t want to get arrested. It’s one thing to tell the Kazakhs to stuff it. Quite another to tell the EU, especially if any of them like overseas vacations.

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Which is why these kinds of ultimatums NEED to be fought against, and aggressively. There ought to be NO room for any government to tell an open source project which features they must--or cannot--implement. Allowing this sort of thing is how you kill open source software. (Which may actually be their goal...)

But, if Mozilla wanted to acquiesce, they could release an EU-only version instead of weakening the trust/security of their browser for everyone.

Also, imagine the backlash that would happen if some part of the United States executive branch demanded the same thing the EU is demanding here.

If they are solely doing it for legal reasons, I would expect some form of malicious compliance - like an accompanying blog post explaining how it'll be marked as "Firefox is legally required to tell you the EU considers this page safe. We disagree. [Learn More]" and that the mark will only be shown to EU users.

Complying to the exact letter of a stupid law to avoid getting sued is understandable. Voluntarily complying to the broadest interpretation without any pushback is not.

Have you ever heard the phrase "show me the man and I'll show you the crime"? The Europeans have and will not be happy if Mozilla does something like this.

The problem with QWACs and eSTAZI is a saturation attack by govt. against people. If Mozilla will display that message it will need to do it on all connections with QWACs, and 99.99% will be safe, initially. So govt. can demand them to remove misleading message. And Mozilla can't detect when govt. will use their CA to do a MITM attack on their political opposition and display message only then.

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