I can assure you they are not concerned by illegal drugs and crime as every single french city is gangrened by drug dealers and thugs. But they really don't like free speech.
I can't pass the paywall but does it mention Paris is losing people? I was living in the 15th arrondissement and this family area turned into a violent zone in a couple of years as they put public housing everywhere. Drug dealers, violence at my kid school, theft... My street became a spot for druggies and I had to pass them with my kids. 15 minutes from the Eiffel tower...
I left this city 3 years ago and found safer land. All my friends did the same. There is no sane reason to stay in an area with so much violence. Parisians will deny this but will just say "you have to avoid this and that, have a pepper spray, do not wear a skirt, do not go there at night..."
Please visit the cities or countries you have in mind first, because I don't see a single country in the West which is still appealing, maybe Switzerland (Lausanne is great but not Geneva).
Here in France you need luck and money to live in a city without too much violence and crime but with good business opportunities. It consumes your mind to be exposed to such ugliness on a daily basis.
It's funny because I'm afraid to raise my kids here and I'm thinking to move to Russia (or Switzerland) to avoid them to study in a Western city (they already speak Russian).
I tried many times to listen to the Beatles but I can't stand a single song. I really tried to understand the popularity, but it does not work on me.
I have close friends which are big music fans, they play music as well. We share almost all our tastes in music but they love the Beatles and I never got it.
My idea is taste is very tight to genetics and sense does not react the same for everybody. And I am very honest when I say I hate the Beatles!
One of my most talented colleague worked at Microsoft in his previous job. My worst experience was with a HR from Twitter, with all the political views and speeches from California, it was awful. She killed the spirit of the company in less than a year.
Please, don't waste your time reading Le Monde. Check the owners and the people on the board (one of them started as a pornographer), and you will get the spirit of this propaganda state sponsored machine.
I started to use... Yandex! It's fast and provides very accurate results. Metager seems very accurate but less user friendly. I think it's an opportunity to have a look to the search engine market, thanks to DDG.
By the way, the DDG "bangs" can be replaced by the native feature of Brave where we can associate a search engine to a keyword.
In the long term, it's a good thing, it's killing the US monopoly on Internet services. American IT businesses are shooting themselves in the foot. Do they really think they are irreplaceable?
They deplatform, censor, shadowban whoever does not think like a 6 o 7 figures IT engineer in California. I hope some humility will grow over there. You can't live forever by ignoring the entire world.
I stopped using Mozilla products when they called for censorship, I will now search for a DDG alternative.
I just ended 17 years of FF fidelity. I was already using Brave on mobile and sometimes on desktop. With the bookmark import tool and my password stored on Bitwarden, it takes a couple of minutes to have a comfy browsing environment.
The only issue I see with Brave is Qwant is the default search engine. Qwant is heavily backed up from the French government and answer to censor request very easily, I have more trust in DDG for privacy & censorship.