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Comment by rgavuliak | Hacker News Reader

Because when buying alcohol, you can for the most part (outside of online purchases, but even then the courier can check an ID upon delivery hypothetially) verify it fairly easily. With online porn, the scale and complications doing it put a much bigger burden on the providers.

Additionally porn has a much bigger stigma than alcohol, so keeping record of what you watch, especially if you're into something more niche connected to your name can be used to discredit political opponents or even single out certain group due to abuse of power. A good example would be exposing a conservative politician that watches gay porn. Not that would necessarily be a bad thing, but there is no equivalent to this with alcohol - oh you drink tequilla, but you're whole ideology is based on drinking whiskey...

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I recently bought age restricted materials online and had to upload a picture of my photo id with a selfie to a 3rd party verifier. Similar to what crypto currency verification goes through.

I think the underlying disagreement/debate is whether or not these initiatives are in good faith. Any implementation of this is going to be imperfect and a motivated person will probably be able to get around this. So the debate, I think, is, if we implement this are we going to incrementally improve it? Or is it just a pretext to point to and say, hey look, this can never work perfectly, so we should ban x, y, and z.

Good faith is insufficient for me and what I would expect are a majority of users (not speaking strictly about porn, social media is coming under scrutiny with similar proposed solutions). Many good faith actors experience data breaches, often from internal attacks.

I think it would be difficult to find a majority of people who support minors having unrestricted access to pornography and shock content. The sticking point seems to be in the implementation details and true intentions of the people behind the initiatives that gives people pause.

> With online porn, the scale and complications doing it put a much bigger burden

This could be very easily done at the ISP level for the whole connection. (I'm talking best effort not a perfect implementation)

Why not just block all "Adult" content by default and allow the buyer to opt in (both temporarily via password, and permanently).

Then it would be a decision each household could easily make about what they want.

edit: I love the downvotes without rebuttal. Reminder that the downvote in this community is not "I disagree with you"

Aside from the implications of turning an ISP into a decider of what you get to see rather than being a "dumb pipe," what about parents who want to view porn but don't want their kids to? Should they be forced to choose between 20 years of abstinence or potentially exposing their kids?

The "household" is a pretty bad level at which to have to make these decisions, given that people of all age ranges share the same household. It seems to me that age verification makes a lot more sense than this, (and ftr I think Utah's bill is ridiculous overreach and would have massive privacy implications that are highly problematic).

> what about parents who want to view porn but don't want their kids to

That was specifically addressed in my post. Temporary disable.

Remember that safe guards dont have to be perfect before being implemented. They just need to be better than the status quo. The status quo right now is 10 year old kids viewing porn and thinking that's what average intimate loving relationships look like.

Yeah the temporary disable isn't my complaint. That's not the worst part. My criticism is the system in place after the parent has made the choice. As a parent, do you choose your own freedom or to protect your children? Most will choose the latter and basically have to choose "abstinence" for themselves for many years. It's a pretty sucky choice to have to make given that such an artificial and unneccesary choice is being forced on them by the legal system and their ISP.

My point was at the moment of choosing they could either open the entire connection to $CONTENT or open the device (MAC address, DHCP assigned IP) up (afaik most ISPs control the router too) for traffic to those sites.

What I'm suggesting does not require abstinence from those who have the password.

Maybe I'm daft but how would ISPs be able to control it? Solely based on domain name? What about porn intermixed with other content on sites like reddit?

> (I'm talking best effort not a perfect implementation)

Correct. The first iterative step would be to simply block the big obvious domains and sources escalating the arms race. It will never be possible to keep 100% of porn out of your kids' hands, but just like alcohol, cigarettes, and getting behind a car we can setup a better starting point than "Do you promise you're older than 18/19/21? YES/NO"

It's a bit absurd that providing alcohol to minor is punishable by a fine, but we give the internet/porn industry a free pass. Also if you were to hand out porn to a minor you'd probably be hit with some kind of charge (inviting a minor to some sexuality), but the Porn industry is handing it out en masse without any repercussion

The iPhone already accomplishes this pretty well in my experience. You can go to Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Content Restrictions > Web Content > Limit Adult Websites. It blocks everything, including porn subreddits.

I assume they use some kind of regex to do this, and it works.

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