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Comment by r2vcap | Hacker News Reader

Fxxk off, to all political actors pretending this is about child protection. Protecting children is not the job of the OS, the device manufacturer, or the internet service provider. It is the parent’s job. If you cannot supervise, monitor, and discipline your child’s internet use, that is your failure, not theirs.

They can provide tools, sure. But restricting adults because some parents fail at parenting is insane. That is how a totalitarian state grows: by demanding the power to monitor and control every individual.

If you cannot control your children, that is your fault. And if that is the case, you should think twice before having kids.

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What if we had ISP police?

Cops to track what people did on the internet, checking every image to ensure it's not pornographic, or every transaction online, to ensure it's not criminal!

Sounds great! Let's just start by rolling out the program to target elected officials and their families as a trial. If every congressional or senate representative wants to undergo a few years of scrutiny to make sure the system works well, maybe the people will follow gladly.

Welcome to CCP China!

Sorry, the point I am trying to make, is bullshit laws should be tested on the group of people advocating and passing those laws, because maybe they wouldn't like the law when it applies to them.

This reminds me of a voting method I've seen some anarchists advocate for: the rules passed by votes should only be enforced on those who voted for it.

of course it is an excuse for controlling/spy on us, every children use and will keep using their parent computer/phone

sure, let all retailers sell alcohol to children to test your theory.

Logic does not work, because alcohol in this case is a product being purchased - Kids can go to the store and buy other things.

So alcohol is more like a gambling website.

It's also illegal to give kids alcohol, they aren't purchasing it. Does that match up with a app that is 18+?

Man, it's really great that we can make laws tailored to specific circumstances and not treat everything the same, too bad you never learned that.

Parenting rule still applies

this whole thing is part of building a mechanism to restrict free speech down the line to cover for a certain "greatest ally" of the united states. make no mistake, the "not a genocide" over the last two years and the recent "not a war" is very much related to this.

How does mandating every OS to have a parental controls API lead to wholesale suppression of speech? Will they mandate it to always be set to the most restrictive setting?

this isn't "parental controls" this is a mandate to verify your age and subsequently identity to an external third party. can't you see how this is a slippery slop to deannonymizing the internet and being able to restrict access for reason that won't be revealed until later?

Are we talking about the same law? California AB1043?

In general, I argue for less state control on anything. But your argument seems flawed from its core. If someone is a bad parent, should we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well? And the line is often blurry, so that's why we designed schools that should compensate even for dumb parents.

And, just to be clear on this topic, I think these age restriction laws are mostly bullshit, but I'm deeply against the concept of putting all the responsabiliy of raising children onto the parents.

If not parents then the school or the local council - you can’t parent from the government down

what about children being fed unhealthy things? childhood obesity is dangerous and also affects their mental and physical health.

let's install cameras in all supermarkets that ensure parents cannot buy unhealthy things for their children.

of course, adults can continue to purchase anything they want for "themselves". but the facial scanning in supermarkets is imperative for child safety!

This is right on the money and really highlights how short-sighted these proposals are.

We're perfectly willing to destroy our privacy for things that don't matter, but then the stuff that does, we don't touch.

Realistically, seeing some boobies on instagram is NOTHING compared to childhood obesity. Nothing. We're talking lifetime of suffering and early death versus boobies.

The government will "parent" as a last resort : the criminal justice system.

I assume you live in the free world. Some socialist states in history, such as East Germany, pushed child-rearing and early education much further into the hands of the state through extensive state-run childcare and kindergarten systems. That model is gone, and for good reason.

Even with schools in place, the basic responsibility for raising children still belongs to the parents. Schools can support, educate, and compensate to some extent, but they cannot replace parental responsibility.

I also see far too much awful news — in my country, Korea, for example — about terrible parents harassing school teachers because their children are out of control.

I was born in a communist country in Eastern Europe, which is now crony capitalist. The issue is extremely complex, and all I can say in such a short paragraph is that ideologically-driven implementations are doomed to fail. It doesn't matter if you believe in "free-market", "the state", "free-speach", "socialism" or "equality", if you put these above the concrete reality of modern parenting, and how much harder it's getting compared to previous generations.

i'm afraid that model is making a strong comeback in the so-called free world

It’s compelled speech. A transmission of expression required by law. The argument settled in 1791. The First Amendment does not permit the government to compel a person’s speech just because the government believes the expression thereof furthers that person’s interests.

It's also a consumer product regulation, of which many already exist. The government compels you to speak about the ingredients in a food product you manufacture, and we don't seem to have a problem with that.

A better analogy would be regulation of addictive activities like gambling and regulation of addictive substances like painkillers. Given that the platforms being regulated were intentionally engineered to maximize addictive potential, this seems a fair and reasonable response.

But you can just block the domains on the device or router... This law is wholly unnecessary.

No you can't, because the software industry spent a lot of effort encrypting DNS and HTTP so that intermediaries can't tamper with or spy on it.

I am a parent. The devices my child uses have root certs that allow me to decrypt traffic that must pass through my proxy to be relayed to the internet. Voila. Problem solved with current tech.

You're lucky the browsers eventually relented and allowed custom root certs. That was seen as a vulnerability and almost patched.

Yes, and the next battle is ech-pinned params in apps. The browser can at least single that ech isn't supported. For apps, you'll just have to strip the ech and downgrade the connection and live with the server dropping you. But that's fine. My kids don't need tiktok if I, the parent, can't decrypt the info.

> we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well

There is not a lot of safeguarding against this in the real world tbh. At the very least I think the OS or internet age verification is not the place to start improving this.

There is some. Bars won't serve minors. The standardisation of parental controls law (the CA/CO one) is much closer to "bars won't serve minors" than it is to "camera drones will follow minors around to make sure they don't drink alcohol"

> Bars won't serve minors.

Bars also won't display a copy of your ID on the main street like digital "think of the children" initiatives are likely to.

Neither does the California/Colorado parental controls API law.

If you get caught with a fake ID they sure as heck do. Had many a friend in college with a copy of their ID on the wall of shame.

You're missing the analogy.

The virtual bars will keep copies of the ids, fake or not, and "accidentally" post a random percentage of them, fake or not, in the main square.

Or sell 100% of them to data warehouses to make an extra buck.

> should we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well?

Just because you're an idiot at 18 doesn't mean you are one for life.

> so that's why we designed schools that should compensate even for dumb parents.

Does that actually work?

> against the concept of putting all the responsabiliy of raising children onto the parents.

Then how do you feel about parents requiring a license before they have a child? If you wish to invite yourself into their responsibilities shouldn't you also invite yourself into their bedroom first?

> If you wish to invite yourself into their responsibilities shouldn't you also invite yourself into their bedroom first?

You're turning of question of measure (how much should society be involved in raising children) into an all or nothing debate, which I explicitly want to reject.

> Does that actually work?

Yes, because of mass education almost every adult you meet can read and write, something new for the last 100 years. Just because a system has (currently huge) faults, doesn't mean we should remove the system entirely.

You make a good point that society may be responsible as well, however we are arguing over trying to use technology to solve meatland problems and this one never should be automated into tech, ever. It's putting burden on artists and engineers to solve things they aren't causing or really responsible for.

Lmao you are a bad parent if you decide to have kids and then expect the world to take care of them for you

Okay, assuming that’s the case for the sake of argument, that’s still a huge problem right? Kids raised by bad parents suffer, which is inhumane. And if you don’t care about that, they also cause problems or costs for society at large (especially if there are a lot of them).

Those are bad outcomes. So is it any wonder that we look for policy/regulatory issues to mitigate the harms of bad parenting?

Okay assuming you're right that society can offset this bad parenting.

Maybe a more prudent first step is giving these kids free breakfast, lunch, and dinner before putting state mandated age verification on a computer.

No argument here!

To be fair if the the parent is garbage there isn't anything the state today can do to truly prevent the child from being corrupted short of taking the child. We ensure that vaccine laws are difficult to enforce, we ensure that the child cannot have any privacy from the parent codified at school. At every stage we gave parents essentially absolute authority over there children with exception to maybe physical abuse. And I say maybe because even in physically abusive parent, it can be difficult for the child to advocate and escape. They can ask to be emencipated but the odds are stacked against you that you can proof you can support yourself financially.

All this to say is while I think the OP is mean about it they but are not wrong. The law argues heavily the parent is supreme at least in the US. But this specific law push the responsiblity of being the supreme authority off of parents. I know you don't like that concept but I think it is very easy to argue that any other model is going to be unacceptable to a pluraity of parents. Thats not to be confused with a parent is responsible for everything there child does because thats not true. But the consquence of that thinking is that children ultimately have some responsiblity in the things they do over the parent, which I think the authors of this law would be sweating at such a statement.

Personally I think the biggest issue for children is impulse control around social media and to be frank I don't think Adults are necessiarly able to deal with the onslaught of endless feed short form video content either. I don't think our brains are built against it very well. I don't know what the solution is but I think what made youtube without shorts different from tiktok is the endless scroll nature. The added friction actually protected peoples conscious and something to add a minimal friction to interactions would actually be massively beneficial to society at large

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