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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Blocking every country outside the US is simply admitting failure here.

For children though? Supposing we were able to be effective at making it hard to host free porn with no ID in the US, why not make kids access to the Internet US-only by default plus a generous allow-list (it's easy to add exceptions for educational and other harmless sites like say, BBC, foreign universities, etc)

You personally adding exceptions for every beneficial foreign website isn’t so trivial. Using someone else’s software to do this for you is more realistic.

However this is just a cost vs benefit tradeoff. If looking at porn instantly killed a kid or caused significant harm then going to extremes would be worth it, but the benefit of such an approach is minimal. There’s a bunch of metrics that tracked kids as internet porn became a thing and the net impact is effectively zero on metrics like suicide, self worth, promiscuity, age of first sex, etc. Instead the correlation goes in the other direction.

Blocking social media on the other hand is much easier and backed up by a lot of research.

How so? Why would I not default filter e.g. Iran or Chad or El Salvador or most of the world on my home network? I can always unblock a specific IP if needed, but chances are that will never happen.

My kids aren't old enough for computers yet, but I'm mostly of the mindset that a whitelist or curated offline cache (at least for anything on the web) is the sanest approach for younger kids. Outside of .gov, .edu, a handful of discussion forums, and stuff not relevant to them like shopping/banking, there's honestly not a lot of utility to the web. If they end up interested in programming, reference material can be kept offline, libraries downloaded through a proxy repository, etc.

You need to add Canada, UK, Australia, Japan, etc to that list to actually achieve what you set out to accomplish. Which then does more harm than what you’re trying to prevent.

He’ll realistically the US doesn’t make the cut either.

Why? Concretely, what would I be trying to allow in Japan? Don't they mostly communicate in Japanese anyway? The US has things like local government, schools, businesses, clubs, organizations, etc. Because the US is where we live. That makes it inconvenient to default block the US. Australia has what that is relevant to us? I don't see any .au in my browser history. Or .jp. Or .ca. There is some ac.uk, granted, but that could probably be kept to a small whitelist. I highly doubt anyone would notice for years if ever if I blocked Japan or Australia. It's a near certainty that no one would notice if I blocked all non-English parts of the web.

Are US organizations hosting in Canada for some reason? They probably wouldn't go further than that for latency reasons.

There's the separate problem of foreign companies having US points of presence, but assuming these laws expand, I'd imagine that would eventually lead to liability for services like cloudflare providing the endpoint/hosting on US soil.

I assume you buy some non US products and many .com address are hosted outside the US by non US companies.

Gigabyte.com for example makes a great deal of computer parts like graphics cards and it’s hosted at 103.130.100.144 which geolocates to Taiwan, Province of China.

bmw.com 160.46.226.165 Germany

Now some of them will route US users to US servers to lower their ping, but that’s an added expense that not everyone pays for.

That's still not giving a concrete reason. Why would I need to access gigabyte.com? I can't even buy their products there; I'd have to buy them on something like Amazon. Firmware updates? If it works I'm not going to change it. If it doesn't, I'm going to return it. If products try to reach out to their manufacturers on their own that's twice the reason to default block as much as you can.

Looking up manuals, researching products before purchasing them, there’s a bunch of reasons to go to a manufacturer’s website.

Firmware updates can fix compatibility long after a purchase, it’s not just a question of whether something works on day 1 but day 540. IE why isn’t this EV charger taking to the solar inverter so it preferentially charges the car over sending energy to the grid? Firmware fix and suddenly it all works.

Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though? Nobody's saying that grown-ups should be blocked inside a US-only Internet. We're saying that cleaning up US IP space from free no-questions-asked porn would mean that parents could allow children more freedom by choosing to allow traffic only to US IPs by default. Just like you could allow your 10-year-old child to roam around a mall if (but ONLY if) you knew it didn't have stores demonstrating sex toys out in front of them.

> Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though?

Because they're interested in it. I was installing Linux when I was 9 because I thought it was cool.

If my parents had walled me off into a foam internet safe-room, it would have stifled one of my lifelong interests that led to my career, and bred trust issues and resentment against my parents.

Weird, because if it was my kid in that scenario, when they found a false-positive in the Internet filter, they'd open their mouth and show me the problem, and I'd just type in my code to unblock it and say "Sorry, kiddo!"

If I had to ask my parents for permission to be interested in something, there's a lot I wouldn't have pursued and the simple gatekeeping is enough of a motivator to find something else to do or bypass the gatekeeper altogether.

Im hosting my site on an IP in the US, just because it was the best hosting option. If the US laws change so that either a) I am liable or b) the hosting provider wont host me. Then of course I would have to move to another, non US, provider. And I wouldn’t be alone so the U.S internet would probably be a lot smaller than it is now.

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