This was not too difficult to enforce when access was mostly in person, but it has become difficult now that access is mostly online.
If society agrees that young people below a certain age should not have access to pornography then it is reasonable, even necessary, to try to implement ways to enforce that restriction online.
I think I first saw a porn magazine before I was 10.
Where there's a will, there's a way. You can't use technology for this, because there will always be a will, so they'll ALWAYS find a way.
This shouldn't be solved at the government level, but at the family level. By parents talking to kids.
Also, unless they implement something like the PRC's firewall, it will a 100% be an inept solution that's easy to get around.
Yes, you can say it should start from young age, but both parents are at work and kids are left with high-speed internet and tablets. They react positively to porn and can get addicted - its a single click away. Hard to prevent that, eh.
I think we will witness the true effect of porn on males mind in future.
But, this kind of age verification bullshit will not help anyone. The politicians will be able to say they did something, and the parents will feel that they don't have to worry about this, making their children even more vulnerable.
I think porn addiction, and its effects are a societal issue, that can not be solved by legislation, only by making it a non-taboo topic, and talking about inside the family.
Edit, ps: your replies are marked as dead for some reason when you make them, and I had to vouch for it before being able to reply.
I remember when cigarette vending machines were banned. I'm sure it had 0.000000 (repeating of course) percent effect on the availability of cigarettes to kids who were motivated to get them. Same with alcohol regulations. Same with weed. Anyone with even an ounce of motivation can and will bypass.
I wrote that if there is a legal restriction on pornography (or cigarettes, or alcohol, or whatever) then it is reasonable to make efforts to enforce that restriction.
There is no enforcement that is 100% effective and some people always find a way to break the law. That's another issue and arguing on this is a strawman argument to my point.
Officially 18+ video games and movies can also be only accessed by adults, yet in my school a 13 years old kid literally ran a black market for horror movies and games like Call of Duty. It won't be any different for porn even if the government goes as far with blocking as the CCP.
I think you're skipping a step here. It was reasonable when everyone involved was in the same jurisdiction and bound by the same laws.
Now that's just fundamentally not true. The question is, is this feasible today? If it is not feasible, I have a hard time calling it reasonable.
This is the starting point and everyone seems to ignore it and to immediately jump to strawman arguments about the feasibility of absolute enforceability.
If the starting point holds, then it is reasonable to try to enforce that restriction.
Only then does the issue of the feasibility become relevant.
Enforcement is always a balance between cost and benefit and is never 100% effective for anything. This is not an argument.
It is feasible to implement effective measures to enforce age restrictions online. The degree of effectiveness depends on how far we're willing to go. I think at the moment the aim is to discourage a significant enough portion of the people, knowing full well that the most motivated will find a way around it.
That does seem like the natural progression (save for the strawman part).
Have desire to do something -> evaluate feasibility -> if it's feasible do it.
Perhaps that's not as standard of a flow as I originally thought. That would actually explain a number of laws on the books now that I think about it.
The 'argument' seems to be that there is not point enforcing the law because it is not feasible to enforce it absolutely.
This logic is obviously fallacious as is reducing enforcement to absolute enforcement.
I also find it disappointing that I was flagged for pointing this out. Strawman arguments are very common. Sometimes they are not used consciously but it is useful to call a cat a cat.
My argument was more that it is stupid and undermines the credibility of the government to pass laws that it cannot enforce. It's that they were passed in the first place that bothers me personally. I'm not holding anything against someone whose job it it to enforce the law having to enforce a stupid law.
We already saw this with the pirate bay, you can't block information. In fact, the harder you try, the funnier it is for people to find ways around it.
currently, people of all ages can easily access commercial pornography which then profits from the activity (either through advertising revenue or overt sales).
So in effect, due to not requiring and not enforcing age restrictions, pornographers are profiting from distributing pornography to minors, which is a crime and should be a crime.
Even if this fails to block access by minors, it will certainly to a much larger extent block the ability of pornographers to profit from illegally distributing adult content to them, and with that, the potential incentive to market to them and the attendant cultural knock-on effects this situation creates.