Many US states planning or have operating system age verification laws
gamingonlinux.com
gamingonlinux.com
The straightforward implementation would be a mandate that every website over a certain size must publish tags about what types of content their site contains, the user-user communication features, the moderation policies, etc. These would be legally-binding assertions on the part of the site operators. Browsers would then allow setting parental controls based on these tags, or other criteria the parents choose (eg no social media, even if social media companies go out of their way to make sites their lawyers deem child-appropriate). And with this setup, the only thing locked down owner-hostile computing devices would be necessary for is for the devices parents would want to give to their kids.
The only way to view a mandate for an architecture with the complete opposite information flow is as a push to start exerting top down control over what can be published on the Internet for viewing by everybody. Basically, a governmental repudiation of the idea of the Internet as a permissionless communications medium, in favor of decreeing it must be a sanitized kid-friendly space by default, only becoming less restricted after you share your real-world identity.
Could be a ploy to give the big commercial players more power while making life shit for FOSS and smaller players. I doubt so many grassroots movements gained traction around the same time globally.
Parents should be aware of where their kids are at all times and physically prevent them from entering liquor stores.
Another difference is that internet access has potential advantages for children. There are ways in which they can derive immense value from it. On the contrary, there is no justifiable reason why a child should be allowed to drink.
Please don't rationalize such draconian measures and help them claim legitimacy.
> If lazy parents don't want to monitor their children while they spend all day on their ipads, that's their problem--it shouldn't be made mine.
This comes up all the time when age verification laws (of any kind) are discussed. Notice that this comment is not concerned with the implementation details of age verification laws, it simply rejects them in principle because the poster believes it is solely the parent's responsibility to monitor their children's Internet usage.
Offline age/ID verification is not a false equivalence comparison. Parents have a responsibility to supervise and protect their children from harm, it's true. But as children get older (esp. in their teens) it's critical for their development to have unsupervised time to interact with the world on their own terms. And for this reason most countries have some form of codified social responsibility to supervise and protect children from harm when they are in public spaces. Liquor stores checking ID is one example of that, but there are many others.
Every thread on HN about this topic has people saying it's solely the parents' responsibility to control their children's access to harmful media. I replied to one with what I believe is a good counter-example of this. As of writing this, 3 of the 5 replies to my comment are shifting the goal posts (criticising implementation details, rather than the concept of age verification). 1 is saying ban all kids from the Internet (requires age verification) and 1 is saying allow kids to buy liquor.
Online public spaces are still public spaces, so they share the social responsibility that offline public spaces have to refuse children access and/or protect them from harm.
I'm also extremely concerned about what social media is doing to children's brains and how that manifests in their adulthood. I'm also concerned about how they affect adult brains, because I see it negatively affecting the decisions of even seniors.
But it's not "as simple as that". These sorts of solutions have serious consequences on civil liberty, privacy, security, affordability of general purpose computing, fair-use access to uaeful information, restrictions on state-sponsored information control, etc. This isn't a black-and-white problem.
> it's hard to just say "well, the cure it worse then the disease, suck it up".
Just as the problem is not black-and-white, the solution isn't either. There are a lot of steps to try before that. One is to try an awareness campaign among kids about the dangers of social media. It's a bit arrogant to believe that kids don't care about their own safety. Another is to assist parents with supervision and parental controls. Instead, they just jumped directly to the nuclear option. This kind of rhetorical framing of the opposition hides the likely nefarious intent behind such despotic measures.
> A lot of people assume politicians are just greedy for power and are conspiring to give the government more surveillance power, but the simplest explanation here is that politicians are being screamed at to do something, and this is something.
You paint both parents and politicians as naïve individuals. There are plenty of parents who can see the problem, since they're Gen X and millenials who grew up observing the change. Meanwhile, assumption of incompetence among politicians is defeated by the fact that much public debate about it is missing here. And the fact that multiple states are coming up with similar bills, indicates the influence of lobbyists. Besides, the US politicians are not exactly known for defending the citizen's rights against corporate interests. They deserve a heavy dose of skepticism and criticism, not the benefit of doubt.
Do you think this has not been attempted already…?
I think there are a large number of them that have been waiting a long time to get away with something like this.
Basically just puppets for wealthy financial interests, which are harder and harder to organize and combat
I don't think there's any requirement anywhere that legislators write their own bills. But they do have a lot of incentive to introduce bills on behalf of their larger campaign donors.