To fight against online scams, the Government intends to impose the use of gouv.fr in the addresses of official services. 75 priority sites will be harmonized by 2026.
Service-public.fr, plus.tranformation.fr, economie.gouv.fr… The French Government has hundreds of official sites made available to the general public, which have become essential for consulting official information, completion of procedures or even access to certain rights. In total, it manages no less than 20,000 domain names. However, their URLs – the “address” of the site visible in the search bar – are very different from each other, which increases the risk of fraud. Indeed, it is difficult to find your way around, and cybercriminals do not hesitate to create sites from scratch with URLs comparable to those of government sites, in order to steal the personal and banking data of Internet users, or even usurp their identity. These addresses can for example be included in phishing emails, in order to deceive the victim.
Also, the Government has decided to improve “the readability of State websites and the quality of digital procedures”. To do this, it intends to harmonize the URLs of 75 so-called “priority” official sites by 2026, as evidenced by circular sent by Elisabeth Borne. “The extension of the .gouv.fr domain name must take place before 1ᵉʳ July 2025 for communication sites and before 1ᵉʳ January 2026 for the procedure sites” indicates the document. The Prime Minister thus wishes to impose the use of “.gouv.fr”, which is not surprisingly the case already. Thus, if many of them already end like this, there are still a few recalcitrants, such as the government site (gouvernement.fr) or Parcoursup (parcoursup.fr).
Gouv.fr: improve the readability of government sites
The Government Information Service (SIG) and the Dinum specify in a press release that this injunction, less restrictive than a law or a decree, “must make it possible to fight against online scams or disinformation by offering a distinctive character in the URL of the site consulted by users, and guaranteeing the official and authentic character of public services.”
To achieve this objective, half of the 21,000 civil servants of the State specializing in digital technology will also have to be trained in the design and accessibility of digital public services by the end of 2023, and all of them by to 2027. The goal is to make these sites more accessible, including for people with disabilities or who are not comfortable with digital, secure, identifiable, but above all as simple as possible. For that, itEach ministry also had to appoint, before September 1, 2023, a “responsible for design” responsible for carrying out the circular.
Despite the commitments of successive governments, the accessibility of government sites remains unequal, in particular for people with disabilities. In November 2022, the Minister of Public Service Stanislas Guerini claimed want to make 80% of the 250 most common digital administrative procedures accessible to them by the end of 2023, and 100% by 2027. And that’s without counting on the digital divide, people – especially those who are older – are not at all comfortable with computers, tablets, smartphones and the Internet.