Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

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Im completely OK with verifying someone's age before distributing age-restricted services to them. That's what an age restricted service is, and obviously we shouldnt let porn companies distribute porn to minors (its already illegal most place). Just dont use porn, facebook, online gambling etc. if you dont want to share your identity.

I can see why it's unfortunate but the idea posited that that it's somehow illegal in the US is ridiculous. You have no right to watch porn anonymously at the expense of holding porn companies liable for distributing porn to minors.

Internet 1.0 was largely read only, ephemeral, or decentralized. Chat rooms, IRC, personal webpages, etc. There was anonymity and there were not age restricted services.

Internet 2.0 introduced age restricted services and the enforcement lagged. The enforcement is now catching up. You can still do all the Internet 1.0 things anonymously but you can no longer gamble online as a 14 year old and hopefully soon you wont be able to watch porn either.

Private companies now can link all your online activities to you. Not an advertisement ID, but directly to you and your loans and your health data and whatever they're selling in the black market. Every data breach is a 100 times. It was already almost possible to directly know about you by buying data, now it's easier.

The point of this is not to verify age really. It is to verify identity. There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.

Also, it's not just porn, facebook, online gambling etc. It is the OS based on some bills. So ALL your activities.

> There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.

Sure there is.

Verifiable Credentials and other similar standards allow this to be delegated in such a way that there is no need to present ID or even let the site know who you are. The site can issue a request to a third party that simply provides back "Yep, we attest that this request was approved by someone over 18".

Depending on the exact scheme, the request may forward you to a broker, who will then forward the request (and your web session) on to the trusted third party of your choice which has already performed ID verficiation (usually a bank). The bank sends a signed response back to the broker, the broker sends a signed response back to the requesting site.

Is it perfect? Maybe not 100%, the broker knows there was a request from a restricted site forwarded to a given bank. The bank knows you have approved a request. There is likely to be an identifier of some sort sent from the site all the way through to the back-end so you know you're not being MITM'd. But in theory nobody should have the full picture.

No practical way I should say. Realistically, it's pretty clear that lawmakers really just want to shove it through in the simplest way possible. Which is probably private third parties.

And private third parties are very shady. They have effective monopolies and no significant public face to care about. I think we have seen this pattern play out in healthcare, compliance and other industries already.

Also idk about banks being the effective gatekeepers to the internet and eventually all technology. Just feels like its not their place to do that.

This argument as framed doesn’t make any sense. Porn is (and WAS) Internet 1.0.

There was porn before most everything on the web. Porn is also speech / art.

Anonymous access should be available for any website that wants to share their content on the Internet provided they have the rights to that content.

States that seek to limit that could make a legal argument that they have the right to limit access, but in the end it’s infringing speech. Worse, it’s unenforceable.

And yes, I would make the same arguments for people posting hateful shit or misinformation.

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