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Comment by big85 | Hacker News Reader

Back in the late 90s or so, there was a proposal to have sites voluntarily set an age header, so parents/employers/etc could use to block the site if they wish. People said it would never work, because adult sites had a financial incentive not to opt in to reduce their own traffic.

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The porn companies already set the RTA header. It was designed by an organisation funded by the porn companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...

It seems there is a GitHub repo somewhere mapping Meta money to lobbyists inside other companies Which is at least interesting

That was created by AI. Ai is great at playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon

What, in the same way movie studios wouldn't comply with the Hayes Code, or comic book publishers wouldn't comply with the CCA, or games publishers wouldn't comply with the ESRB? The financial incentive is to police yourself, because government policing is much, much worse.

There's a great relevant quip: "If you think that the cost of compliance is high, try noncompliance".

If only it were true today :|

Sure but the government doesn't police corporations in the US anymore. The Hayes code was before neoliberalism.

Quite true. The US corporations act like a giant global rabid dog. Fake legislation appears in the USA - lo and behold, it is copy/pasted into the EU. At the least lobbyists are getting rich right now.

At least the EU has GDPR. In the US, our personal data is collected by every app and website and company and packaged, sold and sifted through by a vast collection of private data brokers which the government already ingests.

The Hayes code wasn't policed by the government.

You’d think that one could simply block sites that don’t have the age header set on child computers. This may block kids from hobbyist sites that don’t bother to set their headers as kid-friendly, but commercial sites would surely set their headers properly. Over time sending proper rating headers would become more normalized if they were in common use.

This still isn’t perfect, as it creates an incentive for legislators to criminalize improper age header settings and legislate what is considered kid-appropriate. But it’s still better than this age verification crap.

Yes, that's how parental filters already work. They use a combination of rta tags and external data to block pages. Even works with Google safe search, firewall devices, etc. The rta ecosystem is already built out and viable.

I think the better tack is to stop acting like these laws are being pushed by honest actors with good faith intentions of protecting children.

An age header is not the answer. Why should a site have to decide what content is appropriate for a 18 year old and what content is not? Who is qualified to make that decision for every 17 year old in the world? Do they know my 17 year old? Do they know the rules in our home? What if I'm OK with my kid seeing sex-education stuff, but some lawyer at Wikipedia just decides to tag sex ed articles as 18+? Now I have a shitty choice: Open up the floodgates of "18+" to my kid, do it temporarily while the kid browses the sex ed sites, or not let the kid browse them.

Letting a company or government decide what's appropriate for what exact specific age is fraught with problems.

Then this leads to a very unwelcome view that most of the problems we face are actually rooted in parents' unwillingness to invest too much time in education :)

Right. Perhaps now, a parental filter could be an AI whose prompt is dictated by the parents, which can look at the contents before validating it.

What I am suggesting could address most of that. If they do not participate they get fined. The government loves to fine companies. This assumes they put enough "teeth" into a law that prevents companies from accepting fines as the cost of doing business. This would also require legislation that could block sites that operate from countries that do not cooperate with US laws. Mandatory subscriptions to BGP AS path filters, CDN block-lists which already exist, etc... People could still bypass such restrictions with a VPN but that would not apply to most small children. Sanctions and embargoes are always an option.

>fined

Exactly. If you’re hurting kids to make more money selling porn videos, straight to jail.

I’m glad there are solutions that won’t ruin the Internet. Now the uphill battle to convince our legislators (see: encryption & fundamentally technically ignorant calls for backdoors).

I’m here to die on this hill!

> Back in the late 90s or so, there was a proposal

This one: https://www.w3.org/PICS/

PICS was very complicated and attenpted to cover all possible "categories" of adult content. It was confusing, incomplete and only a handful of sites voluntarily labelled their sites with it. RTA is one simple static header that any site operator could add in seconds unless they get more complicated with it by dynamically adding it to individual videos say, on Youtube which means in that case the server application would need to send that header for any video tagged as adult.

I added PICS to my forums but it was missing many categories of adult content. I ended up just selecting everything as I could not predict what people may upload which made for a very long header.

> unless they get more complicated with it by dynamically adding it to individual videos say, on Youtube

YT already does this. I never watch YT signed in, and I often see videos that require you to be logged in as the video is age restricted.

Agreed though in my example the point would be to set the header in the case the child is logged in but for whatever reason the site does not know their age. Instead of a third party site, a header is sent with the video tagged as adult that triggers parental controls if they are enabled by the device owner.

People were wrong.

We pay money online mostly through credit cards. Credit card transactions can be reversed. If children spend money on porn, those payments are likely to be reversed. This is really bad for the ability of the porn sites to continue receiving credit card payments, and continue making money.

An age header is a trivial step that can reduce the odds of the adult site receiving payments that later get reversed. Win, win.

But if someone is willing and able to pay, then the adult industry wants the choice of whether to access content to be up to them. If government tries to regulate them, they'll engage in malicious compliance - do the minimum to not be sued, in a way that they can still reach customers.

For example Utah tried to institute age verification. The porn industry blocked all IP addresses from Utah. Business boomed for VPN companies in Utah. Everyone, including porn companies, knows that a lot of that is for porn. But if you show up with a Nevada IP address, the porn's position is, "You're in Nevada. Utah law doesn't apply." Even if the credit card has a Utah zip code.

If you live in Utah, and you're able to purchase a VPN, the porn companies want your money.

>But if someone is willing and able to pay

If someone is willing and able to pay, they have a source of money. If they aren't allowed to buy something, that control should be applied at the level where they get the money. If the child is using an adult's credit card, responsibility lies with the adult. If children need to have their own credit cards, the obvious point of control is the credit card itself.

But also, most porn is ad-supported, pirated or free. Directly paid content is a small fraction. So all of this is moot for porn.

There was a random comment here on HN few days back that adult contents have lower chargeback rates than everything else.

So ig stop spreading hallucinatory misinformations?

link?

The odds of random porn purchases being reversed are very different than the odds of random porn purchases by 14 year olds getting reversed.

Source, I have a number of friends who worked on the web side of online porn a long time ago.

There's an anecdote about an attempt to ban porn in Utah, which cited a survey which found that most people were opposed to adult content. The defense argued that most people will oppose porn when asked in public in order to appear moral, even if privately they are avid consumers.

As proof, they provided records of cable TV pay-per-view purchases in Utah. The defense won.

Many porn sites are ad-funded so don't have a any credit-card based motivations.

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