The internet wants to check your ID

Specifically, governments mandate that:

1. Websites/apps/etc. MAY label content (via headers) indicating when their content/service is/isn't appropriate for some specific audience (e.g., children) according to X/Y/Z regulations. Websites/apps/etc. MUST NOT incorrectly label their content.

2. Devices that can access the internet must not be sold directly to miners without parental consent.

3. Devices that can access the internet must include parental control software can be configured to allow/forbid all apps/content that may contain content not deemed suitable for children (in the jurisdiction where the device is sold).

Importantly, this kind of solution solves the "borderless internet" problem:

1. Device sellers are regulated in the jurisdiction where they sell the device.

2. Service providers take no (additional) per-jusrisdiction responsibility until they start labeling their content. By labeling their content, they are claiming to abide by specific regulations.

Parents also don't care if their kid is sitting 5h daily in front of some roblox gambling machine.

The OSA has actually already been law for about two years!

It was just awaiting secondary legislation (statutory instruments) that Ofcom has been developing, in conjunction with industry.

The web industry either knew or really if it was responsible and serious should have known this legislation was coming in 2025. Ofcom have not kept secrets.

So if there is a co-ordinating entity, it's likely the porn industry itself and in particular Aylo/Mindgeek, who would very much like a situation where governments let them show porn to people they can sell things to, and who therefore stop using Visa and Mastercard as proxies.

And, again, for clarity: the OSA does not require you give "ID" to any porn sites. Just that you verify your age via mechanisms that might include making a small credit card payment or visiting a link on your phone (since your phone will need to have been unblocked to view adult material, which is an industry standard parental control since on-device controls are often either non-existent, easily-circumvented or utterly confounding)

The same payment processor chokepoints and platform pressure tactics you're describing have been gleefully wielded by progressive activists to deplatform "dangerous misinformation," "hate speech," and "extremist content."

Remember when everyone cheered Mastercard and Visa cutting off WikiLeaks? Or Cloudflare and Kiwifarm? Or celebrated when payment processors started dropping anyone deemed "problematic"? The infrastructure for financial censorship didn't materialize overnight when Christian groups discovered it existed.

The left pioneered the modern "advertiser pressure" playbook - organizing campaigns to get platforms to ban everything from "Russian disinformation" to "COVID misinformation" to whatever qualified as this week's "stochastic terrorism." The same NGO-to-government pipeline exists there too: activist groups coordinate with sympathetic staffers, push model legislation, and pressure companies through ESG scores and brand safety concerns.

Both sides have their "think of the children" trump cards. One side waves "grooming" and "pornography," the other waves "radicalization" and "harmful content." Both genuinely believe they're saving society from moral decay, they just disagree violently on what that decay looks like.

The real tragedy is that both camps are so busy fighting their culture war that they've handed unprecedented censorship power to payment processors and tech platforms who answer to no one. Congratulations to both teams - you've successfully created the infrastructure for whoever wins to impose their vision of morality on everyone else.

It didn't come out of nowhere -- it literally came out of the previous government and a Queen's Speech.

Though creates other issues with, i.e. selling validation tokens.

So for example, your ID card could have [Name, Pubkey, DOB] signed by the issuer, where pubkey is a pubkey for the ID card holder that supports unique signatures. The card has contains the private key and can sign with it.

Then to gain access to AdultsOnly.com you sign "AdultsOnly.com" and hash the result. This value is your site-identity.

You hand the site the site identity and a zero knowledge proof that you know a [Name, Pubkey, DOB] and valid issuer signature with DOB<=DATE and pubkey matching the signature that went into the hash.

Now they know you have an ID by that issuer with an acceptable DOB, and they know that one ID == one account (so no leaked/cracked ID being used to let everyone in). But they cannot link IDs between different sites or with names... if the private keys are not possessed by the state (e.g. generated by you when you get your ID) not even the state could help convert ID to names or link IDs between different sites.

You gotta attack the root argument: this space was never intended for children, and it is the sole responsibility of parents to protect their children in adults-only spaces like the internet.

Please don’t spread lies to make your point. The current Prime Minister was the DPP who oversaw the prosecution of the Rochdale scandal and worked on changing reporting and investigation. Listen to Andrew Norfolk’s interview with the News Agents if you’d like a citation.

Where is the equivalent here?

Metaphor time:

Consider a liquor store in a physical space, and a porn site on the internet.

The liquor store requires ID at point of sale because it has limited entry and exit into the building. It has physical restrictions making it harder for minors to enter, and harder to exploit their way into accessing age-restricted items. This is because the physical world is always shared by default, and we must make rules securing adults-only spaces in a world that’s intrinsically shared with children.

A digital porn site exists on a realm solely built by adults, that requires adults to access in the first place. A child cannot sign up for an ISP, a child cannot buy their own cellular phone[1], and a child cannot decide to share their coffee shop or library WiFi for free to everyone within range. At some point, a child requires the assistance of adults to enter the internet. That makes the internet a de facto space for adults first, not children, and that is why I vehemently disagree with vilifying the majority of users (adults) just to “protect” kids who will bypass those age checks like they’ve successfully done for decades.

There will always be youth finding a way to procure pornography, drugs, or alcohol underage. The difference with the internet is that it’s by adults, for adults, and that children are guests who should be supervised by adults in their circles - not by policing all the adults online through intrusive surveillance measures.

[1] Children can, of course, use cash or cards to buy prepaid phones and airtime in many countries. I do not think this should be allowed and would be a better venue to restrict access than a surveillance state.

You say we are looking for solutions. There are better solutions, including privacy preserving solutions, which can work. We just don’t have any of those yet.

The most dangerous people on earth who are not in prison are on the internet; It is an adult place. Making it look like a child friendly place will not change this. But it will lure more kids online unsupervised and unprotected.

For kids, we had services like Prodigy and Compuserve that distilled the internet into approved content suitable for minors. We can - and probably should - go back to that, rather than throwing youth onto the regular internet and letting them fend for themselves online.

The UK has a long long history of over reach with all of theses initiatives.

The UK governments is desperate to keep a increasingly fragile society from boiling over and their natural inclination is to censor, it's what they have always done.

ARPANET and the related early nets were intended for sharing research and sharing scarce computing resources for research purposes.

Everything else was an accident of the telecoms wanting to get their respective beaks wet.

My child cannot walk into a gas station and buy beer or cigarettes, cannot buy liquor, cannot buy a machine gun, cannot walk into an adult book store or a strip club, cannot operate a motor vehicle.

If you, an adult, aid and abbet my child in any of these activities you’re likely going straight to jail.

You do not magically get a pass because “the internet.” We live in the real world, with laws, with rules, with social expectations. It’s time for the free pass to end.

But these kinds of solutions are "too difficult" and require thinking.

Yes, you could use someone elses ID to access the porn.

That someone else could also sit next to you and press the button.

There is no solution that isn't 'proxyable' with the aid of the approved party. No solutions being considered are even particularly resistant to borrowing someone's ID or credit card, etc..

ZKP are no worse in this respect.

Adding treacherous computing doesn't improve any of them other than "approved software says its okay" is just a cheap (and fairly insecure!) way of implementing looksalike functionality to an actual cryptographic technique.

Imagine you have a private key whose public key is signed by a trusted issuer if and only if you're an adult.

Now you use this to get an account. What if you share your private key? Well you can only have one account per key and it's otherwise the same as just obtaining the porn for the improper users yourself (which is always possible).

Won't that ID just get linked between sites and used to track you? Yes. But you can use a somewhat more complicated version of this scheme where you can get access to a single unlinkable ID per site... so then you can't be tracked.

You need to talk to push for change in your democratic government, not try to find technical workarounds around government tyranny while going on with your day as if what your government is doing is normal.

Hard disagree. Look at the reaction from the Tea app, a whole lot of concern for the women and their info, not a peep about the men who didn't even consent in any way. Am I supposed to believe it's conservatives?

Chat control in the EU is also not coming from conservatives, it's a bipartisan issue through and through.

See OnlyFans et al where the alternatives have slowly been taking over as OnlyFans is forced to become ever more restrictive.

Technically multiple tools are available from poor IP blocking that technically meets the requirement (eg malicious compliance) to tools like ohttp where the origin is unaware of the customers location and can claim genuine surprise.

This is basically a repeat of the UK PirateRadio. Either there's about to be a PornBBC (heh) or users and sites will migrate around ofcom.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore

For games, piracy is going to be huge again.

For sites, externally hosted websites will gain more traffic.

1. brand protestors as radicals and arrest them, serving as a public warning to deter others.

2. police(outside the US) have a major force advantage over unarmed population and can easily overpower you, whereas online they do not have any kind of power without censorship, which is why they're trying to gain control over it