If parents don’t want kids getting into mischief online, then they need to restrict device and network access appropriately.
The internet was never intended for children, and we need to stop placing the onus on other adults to police themselves instead of on parents to police their children.
I do agree with everything else though. The onus is on the parents to do their job as a parent. If the goal is to protect children then improve the tools available to parents. They already have tons but the work is never done.
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.
There are no records indicating the relevant early engineers said this or felt this way.
I imagine someone did down the road but then we're into "Some guy had an opinion about the internet" territory.
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.
I will say the UK has a history of really stupid laws like this though so it's not exactly surprising that it would happen. But it's more surprising how it's spread and succeeding in so many places.
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.
Requiring age verification online would be like requiring my ID every time I wanted to drink a beer I already bought. I already had to give my ID when buying internet service, and again when I got the credit card I use to pay for it, and again for the bank account I use to pay the credit card, and the job that puts money into my bank account, and to buy the car that gets me to and from these places.
If you’ve allowed a minor online without so much as a web filter in place, you’ve already lost the battle. Punishing strangers for your failure to police your own network devices and children is a complete abdication of your responsibilities as a parent.
I'm not accustomed to providing ID to get internet service. Some providers run a credit check, but many don't. And if they don't check credit, they don't need your ID. At least in the US, there's an army of prepaid cell providers that don't offer credit and don't check ids.
Prepaid credit cards are a thing. Bring some cash to a grocery store, and for a small fee, you can get an internet capable payment method. Or my local credit union offers debit cards for 'teen checking' accounts, but there's no age restriction; they check ID, and I'm pretty sure they require an adult sponsor.
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.
Not to speak of the risks of a fully deanonymized web, once naiive black-listing doesnt cut it anymore...
And btw, your kid could possibly buy all items you named online today, black markets are a consequence of unmet demand. So what now? Talk about parental oversight or AV for amazon and TOR?
If you want a true apples-to-apples comparison using your list - you've already purchased beer, cigarettes, liquor, a machine gun, adult books, and a motor vehicle and brought them all home. At that point, it is your responsibility as a parent to ensure your children do not use any of them. Why should internet access be any different?
What you're really asking for is an adult other than you to be present in your house to ensure your children don't use things that you don't want them to. That's called a nanny. Unfortunately, the way in which you want this to work is for every house hooked up to the internet to be required to have a nanny.
No thank you.
No way is internet access "fundamentally broader and harder to limit" than alcohol access.
That world doesn't exist, though (at least not in my part of the US). I don't need the internet to do any of those things.
It's not a pass, it's just a reflection of the real world, which is not as rigid with rules and expectations as you are making it out to be. In any case, I'd rather the Internet remain as free, as in speech, as possible. If the cost of that is little Billy sees a nipple on a computer screen while daddy isn't watching, I think we'll be OK with the consequences. The consequences of the alternative is likely worse, and the article goes into this.
I’m sure someone has tried to bring it back but it’s interesting to me that the public at large seems to have forgotten these ideas.
I think this pov tends to come from people that are nostalgic for the wild west days of the web. It doesn't matter if the internet was not originally intended for children -- they're here, en masse, and now society is looking for solutions.
Where is the equivalent here?
But you can watch videos of people being beheaded in subreddits by simply signing in.
My point is that if a society decides that certain content should be age restricted -- it being on the internet shouldn't make the difference.
I largely think that age restriction laws are ridiculous. BUT, I don't think the internet is some special haven, exempt from all of society's standards/laws enforced offline.
also worth noting that in most places in the US, it’s not a legal requirement to card, but a industry agreement with the MPAA (self regulation)
I don't think that's a very good comparison, even setting aside the points made in other replies to you.
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.
I'm not critiquing your argument, I'm really just sitting here in amazement that the zeitgeist thinks these are of similar harm.
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.
But, dismissing the whole verification effort on principle because "it's the internet and it's inherently for adults" is silly and unrealistic, IMO (not that you were). It's just not the world we live in anymore, the internet is used by everyone, for everything, and we should build accordingly.
Believing that Google's solution will be truly ZK, interoperable, or good is similarly silly, unrealistic, and not the world we live in anymore. Unfortunately.
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.
Case in point, the same UK politicians who try to burry the Muslim grooming gangs story where kids got harmed, are now suddenly the ones pushing for Internet ID to "protect the children". If they cared so much about the children, why didn't they go after the grooming gangs immediately, instead of trying to hide it.
What they want is internet censorship, to take away the internet freedom of assembly, the ability to control and ban any criticism from the public targeting politicians and the elite the same way they do to mainstream media. No more people taking about political scandals, corruption, illegal immigration, sex scandals, Epstein list, Ukraine, Gaza, law enforcement abuse, mass shootings, etc, they don't give a damn about the kids.
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.
Healthy, adult-only spaces online have been leading a “no minors” crusade for decades. We bar minors from our spaces, and promptly eject them when discovered. That said, we’re also far more familiar with any politician or puritan with the reality that kids will find a way into adults-only spaces if they really want to be there, and likely succeed because their parents are wholly absent or utterly incompetent at managing their kid’s online presence and access.
This always goes back to the parents. Every single time.
People keep saying this but I've never seen it happen IRL. Probably because previous generation of people who are now parents, grew up with uncensored internet and turned out largely all right, or at least the issues they have (economy, jobs, housing) aren't due to a lack of internet censorship to "protect" them.
>You gotta attack the root argument: this space was never intended for children
That only distract people from the government trying to censor free speech on the internet using kids as a human shield.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth to that point: we already know this, but we’re the exception to the norm.
Listening to non-technical folks, they genuinely believe the internet is entirely hardcore smut that’s destroying kids and that we’re actively soliciting minors with sexual content. That’s not remotely true, but more people believe that narrative than the technically correct argument that this is all just a mass surveillance ploy by the government to weed out and persecute “undesirables” by wielding sex as a weapon.
So now picture how we sound making the technically correct argument to the masses who believe the narrative: we sound batshit insane, and they won’t listen to us.
Instead if we take the side of faulting absentee parents for failing to police their kids online, then that usually results in their defensive rebuttal of “we both work full-time, and I don’t have the time or skill to do this!”
That’s what we want to hear. That argument can be reasoned with, because they’re correct in their justification, even if the act they’re justifying is wrong. Once they admit that, we can take their side in more constructive ways, like:
* Yeah, tech companies do make it too easy for kids to go online and wade into adult spaces. Big Tech and Social Media companies should do more to curate a child-only space that’s entirely curated rather than throwing them onto the open internet by default
* Yes, the fact everything requires kids to be online in front of a screen is bad, and we should be mandating kids have healthier relationships with technology by limiting their access or promoting better understanding of its functions
* Yeah, a society where both parents have to work full-time to survive does hinder child development and prohibits parents from nurturing their growth in desired ways. We should build a society where one parent can stay home full-time and be the caregiver and mentor children need to thrive
* Yeah, these devices are deliberately complicated to prevent easy moderation by parents of their children, and it’s by design. We should create regulations that make it easier for parents to secure their children’s devices, not make it easier for kids to get online
See? Once we pivot the argument back to, “You’re right in your feelings but wrong in your attack vector, let’s work together on this”, we’ll get more support and allies in building a better solution for everyone.
For the majority of people "the internet" just means Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Tiktok, GMail, Amazon and Youtube. There's not much prono stuff there harming kids in order to have the government implement more radical measures than the laws we already have (COPPA in the US, other shit in the EU).
If they'd really want to help kids they would just ban Tiktok and Instagram and all these instant dopamine brainrot apps, not sites where kids might see some breasts.
As Millennial, internet we grew up in is vastly different from internet the kids are growing up in. Our access was different and content pushing was much different.
Do you think these online ID rules will:
1. actually keep kids safe from bad stuff? kids in the UK already bypassed it, and Instagram and TikTok are already bad for kids and not getting blocked so who's it really protecting?
2. or will it mainly be used by the government to easily doxx and crack down on those who speak against it while kids still can access porn?
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.