Hacker News Reader

Comment by antonymoose | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with your agree. While the “buck stops (t)here” with a parent, we also live in a society with rules and expectations around what a youth can access and what there is expectation on all of us to play by those rules.

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.

View on HN

A child also can't obtain a credit card and pay to hook up an internet connection on their own.

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.

Internet access should be different because it's fundamentally broader and harder to limit than those things. If most people got their drinks from a machine with a monthly subscription, I would definitely say that the machine should check your ID before dispensing beer. Perhaps it has "parental controls" that let you set a beer password, but this is an incomplete solution; it's not practical for me to audit every drink dispenser my kid might spend time around, and it does nothing to protect children of irresponsible parents who can't be bothered to set it up.

To make alcohol you need sugar, water, and yeast.

No way is internet access "fundamentally broader and harder to limit" than alcohol access.

This is an insane take in a world where you cannot access basic public services, pay bills, or really do business at all without an internet connection. Connecting your house to a public road is not an invitation for biker gangs to throw drug parties in your backyard, and connecting to the internet is not a free-for-all either.

I find your public road network analogy interesting. Should your car require you to prove your age before it will start? How else can we protect your kid (and others) from the dangers of an 8 year old taking the family sedan for a spin?

> in a world where you cannot access basic public services, pay bills, or really do business at all without an internet connection

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.

As a child I did most of those things offline. Hell, I bought tickets to R rated movies too. I know people who made fake ID's. I've been to parties where the hosting parents didn't care if we had a screwdriver before we were 21. No one went to jail. I could have bought cigs, too, but I was never interested. I had a few family members die horrible smoking related deaths. I'm not sure how this fits in with your analogy, but I dunno, beside accessing free adult material, it's probably easier for a child to do all of those things offline (but even then, lots of people have premium channels with ondemand nudity, too, so who can really say for sure?).

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.

Your argument is a slippery slope bc there is alot of complexity to adress, you are effectively trying to black-list, so putting the burden on the parents will always be a better a solution bc they are simply closer to the root of the problem, so better positioned to white-list.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com