I understand your perspective, but I'm going to disagree with what I think you mean, which is that /only/ parents should be responsible for their kids, and that nobody else should have to do anything at all for them. I know that's not exactly what you said, but given the context it's what I am going to argue against.

Kids are a normal part of our society. We were all kids at one point. Our lives were all made better by reasonable accomodations that others made for our safety and wellbeing. If the outside world is only designed for adults, then there is an impossible burden on parents to raise children.

I think we can and often do make reasonable accomodations for kids. Like checking IDs at the bar or checking heights before letting people on a rollercoaster.

What that level of responsibility is for websites, I'm not sure. But it's not zero.

So easy to say, so hard to do.

With heroic effort I can maybe lock down my routers, my kids devices, all devices in my house and they can just go to a friends house and see or, maybe even purchase, every single thing that we[1] have deemed unsafe or inappropriate to children. I am not just talking about porn but drugs, every conceivable type of violence, every conceivable type of crime and criminal, every kind of advertisement, every kind of political propaganda. From the point of view of a parent, the internet is a pipe that potentially connects your child's innocence and naivety to every single bad influence and predator in the world.

Yes, I could keep my kids offline but then they'd pay the price of being complete outsiders.

I don't actually have a solution because I don't trust the government to regulate the internet but from a societal POV of a society that wants to keep existing it's probably best to make the easy path sane and safe per default. That's the way we tried to do it in the past, anyways.

[1] we, as in the majority of people in the majority of societies

Of course. But in many other areas involving things that are harmful to children we require others to do things that make it easier for the parents.

A couple examples are that we require purveyors of cigarettes and alcoholic drinks to check customer IDs and not sell to children, and we require annoying childproof packaging on many products.

So we've generally already accepted that it is not just parents who should have some responsibility toward children.

Websites aren't responsible for my kids. They should just provide a working mechanism for me to block them other than "I promise Im 18!". Currently it is impossible to safeguard the internet to kids once they know how to read and write.

The privacy concern is BS. Your provider already knows everything you do online. The solution is easy too - sites add a blocking flag that the internet provider uses to block access to the content unless told otherwise by the subscriber.

This has 0 privacy concerns. After all, despite https, Comcast knows what you are doing if you go to pornhub.com. And it costs nothing. A string with a magic number.

Parents should be responsible for their kids, not Tobacco companies.

Yeah, parenting is hard work and takes lots of time.

Something something two parents working…

100% agree. And websites should also be responsible for their websites.

That businesses should restrict things like this is not a very controversial thing; try using the "parents should be responsible for their kids, not liquor stores" line after selling booze to a 12-year old and see how well that goes for you.

You can't expect parents to be on top of their children 100% of the time. Aside from being unrealistic, helicopter parenting also isn't good for children. Parents need to be able to give children some reasonable amounts of freedom with the confidence they'll be reasonably safe.

Now, if you want to argue what "reasonably safe" means and where and how we make this trade-off: great! Let's do that!

But discussion stoppers like this aren't hugely helpful, or insightful, or anything.