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Comment by nirui | Hacker News Reader

In case people no longer remember, when China started to require websites to register for a license before be allowed to operate, it was for "protecting the children" too.

This simple policy then goes on to silence most individual publisher(/self-media) and consolidated the industry into the hands of the few, with no opportunity left for smaller entrepreneurs. This is arguably much worse than allowing children to watch porn online, because this will for sure effect people's whole life in a negative way.

Also, if EU really wants "VPN services to be restricted to adults only", they should just fine the children who uses it, or their parent for allowing it to happen. The same way you fine drivers for traffic violation, but not the road.

And if EU still think that's not enough, maybe they should just cut the cable, like what North Korea did.

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Just a recap how it happened in Russia:

1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8

2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.

3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).

4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).

5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).

6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.

7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc).

DPI = Deep packet inspection?

yes

Similar stuff is happening in Turkey as well. Afaik with ipv6 adoption goverment mandates DPI hardware at ISPs. It was voluntary for ipv4 traffic.

and yet my friend in Moscow is able to use VPN to get around all this

This is very up to chance. Sometimes the VPN works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's fine on the home Internet, but fails on the cell data, sometimes it's otherwise. And it is fine if you're somewhat tech savvy and okay with tinkering with settings, but a huge pain for the older relatives.

TURN servers is whats needed in those situations

How about next year?

It's cat and mouse game, VPN providers have to constantly update their protocol after being blocked by DPI.

Yes, indeed, it is still possible. Right now RKN introducing new DPI capabilities at TSPU(govt filtering hw/sw stack mandated at ISP) - proactive host probing/scanning and mandate for russian services to check and report VPN users hosts. I.e. you use e-shop app and it will report you Nehterlands VPS IP if detected, including split-tunneling tricks)

I'm sure you're able to drive faster than the speed limit as well. The issue isn't whether technical circumvention is in the realm of possibility. The base issue here is that even so called 'democratic' governments seem to be copying the authoritarian playbook when it comes to cracking down on privacy online.

"If you are not in prison yet, it is not your merit, but our failure." -- attributed to Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Upd: are they able to use VPN when the Internet is in so-called "white-list mode" where only certain websites are available?

Won't they just be able to identify the traffic at his local internet provider as being suitable for a VPN usage match and send 'law enforcement' over?

> attributed to Felix Dzerzhinsky

You can attribute it to George Washington or Louis XIV with the same level of verifiability/veracity.

English is not my native language, but I believe "attributed" does imply unverifiability. Otherwise other word is used.

Do they sleep well at night?

I remember writing about Roskomnadzor well before 2019, it’s existed at least since 2013, and don’t think it was particularly new then.

I could miss some things from memory, but RKN originally had much less power back in the days, they were just trying to execute court orders - it started actually being self-sufficient censorship agency in ~2019

Looks like you're talking about the new powers they got in 2018 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE...

But proper curial oversight stopped with the Lugovoi law in 2013, after which RKN could block directly based on orders from the General Prosecutor's office.

8. 2026 White-list mode is occasionally enforced.

dont give them ideas man, with LLMs & image/video creation models, I'm this close to not caring about pubic internet now for non-work/news/payments

This is not idea, this is reality in 2026 (Tbf only for cellular internet)

True.

France is already at 5! The free world marches on.

i noticed your profile has a lot of great info onthis. where did you learn?

But you are asking logical questions. You are thinking and talking too much for a World citizen in 2026. "Reasoning" is a reserved word for chatbots now, so we humans are not allowed to do that anymore. We can only obey like a bot and pretend all the lies they tell are the truth.

BTW I live in Turkiye where the government banned ALL the adult websites around 2008. Even as an adult you can't access them. This year they are banning VPNs, introduce age controls and ID verification COORDINATED with the rest of the world. Also banning some games, control social media, and basically make it legal to control and track everyone on the internet. What a coincidence that similar attempts are simultaneous in many independent countries.

And no, children have not been really protected in Turkiye since 2008.

Not only that, sprinkle a bit of hate speech laws on top and then you got rid a lot of political competition that could disagree with you

Grab a SIM-card from Bulgaria with roaming enabled. Internet is routed through the Bulgarian ISP even when you are in Turkiye. Full internet access, no VPN required.

Until the three representatives from Bulgaria and the ones from the other EU countries win out lobbying for ChatControl and expand it to VPNControl too.

You have to tolerate 100ms ping.

It’s like living in Australia baby. And yet believe it or not, people do!

Where do they coordinate that?

You always hear the argument "protecting the children", because anyone oposing the regulation/laws can be labeled at best "exposing the children to danger" or at worst "pedofile". So as a consequence at best the oponents of such regulation/laws should not be listened to, or at worst they should be put into prison.

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

The excuse has to be something nobody can appear to be supporting (pedophilia, terrorism, nazis, etc.). It's not only an appeal to emotion, it's also a false dichotomy, a loaded question, guilt by association.

Others look at this recipe and can't help but notice its effectiveness. Eventually nobody is beneath pulling this kind of logic, even if they were the ones crucifying it just a few short years ago. The weaker the leader, the more likely that that they forget where they wrote down those principles of theirs and resort to this crap.

> The excuse has to be something nobody can appear to be supporting (pedophilia, terrorism, nazis, etc.).

If only being associated with pedophilia and nazis was still something that had to be avoided because it would be career ending otherwise.

Right? I was just thinking that Maine looks to be electing someone who had nazi tattoos, and it would seem pedophilia is one of the few things both parties approve of at least in deed.

(Graham Platner had the tattoo covered up 10/2025)

> The excuse has to be something nobody can appear to be supporting (pedophilia, terrorism, nazis, etc.).

If this actually works then it should work in both directions, right?

Example: Many websites are malicious or adversarial, therefore anything enabling a service to discern whether the user is a vulnerable child is a boon to website-operating pedos and needs to be eliminated. The law should inhibit predatory services from being able to discern the user's age, to protect the children.

The FATF guidance actually state that if your purchase a VPN license (shows up on credit card bill) you should suspect of being pedophile by your bank staff:

https://x.com/moo9000/status/1901906097323012466?s=20

All government drifts toward autocracy over time, it takes constant pressure to keep it on track. It makes you tired after a while.

> In case people no longer remember, when China started to require websites to register for a license before be allowed to operate, it was for "protecting the children" too.

Indeed I do not remember this, nor can I find corroborating evidence that there was much of an effort to justify the requirement to the public at all. As far as I can tell, the government simply decided that they needed more control over the internet, so they made a law to give themselves more control over the internet. https://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2000/content_60531.htm It has no special provisions limited to children that only later got extended to adults. (Meanwhile, restrictions on how long children may play games continue to only apply to children, AFAIK.)

I have an extreme slippery slope idea.

If they want to protect children, shouldn't they sterilize everyone?

Every child born, regardless of wealth will inevitably suffer injury, illness, and psychological setbacks. Therefore, the best way to protect them would be not allowing people to have children.

By the way, not having children is also more eco-friendly, because an infinite series simply converges.

I wonder if I’ll see this ridiculous scene in my lifetime.

Forced sterilisations for population control has been a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttawar_forced_sterilisations

Ashen vibes

> By the way, not having children is also more eco-friendly, because an infinite series simply converges.

This one isn't actually accurate. Younger people have longer time horizons (i.e. aren't expecting to be dead as soon) and are therefore more likely to support policies like electrifying transportation and generating power from lower CO2 sources, and policies get enacted when they have majority support, so causing the population to skew older by reducing the number of children is ecologically very bad.

In theory. In reality the number of young people concerned about climate change is high, but the number of those willing to then not take a airplane for a few days of vacation is pretty low in my experience.

So supporting policies, "that somebody should do something" sure, also my generation thinks like this and the older one. But supporting policies that also actually affect themself, different story.

Because there is also the effect of doomerism. If the world is doomed anyway, then I can at least enjoy my vacation while I am still alive.

> In reality the number of young people concerned about climate change is high, but the number of those willing to then not take a airplane for a few days of vacation is pretty low in my experience.

Probably because air travel is something like 2% of CO2 emissions, driving long distances also emits CO2 so the actual reduction is more like 1%, and people understand what a cost/benefit ratio is.

Meanwhile they're significantly more likely to do things like buy an electric car or hybrid or install rooftop solar, which makes a much larger actual difference.

> But supporting policies that also actually affect themself, different story.

Who is more likely to support voting to fund car chargers, working people who are tired of buying gas or retirees who want to use that money to increase government retirement benefits?

> Because there is also the effect of doomerism.

Doomerism itself comes from being in the minority.

I would support air travel taxes even though I’ve used a plane 5 times this year already.

Just because I don’t believe in voluntary action doesn’t mean I wouldn’t accept society-wide policy. I want impactful societal action, not self-harm disguised as feelgood ecohobbies.

This problem can only be solved by coordinated government intervention.

Worth remembering that eugenics was the smart idea among many intellectuals in the earlier 20th century. The fascinating list of eminent adherents include J. Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill, T. Roosevelt, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, Herbert Hoover, J.H. Kellogg (of corn flake fame), Oliver Wendell Holmes, GB Shaw, Sidney Webb (early socialist, co-founder of the LSE & the Labour Party) and William Beveridge who created the British National Health System (NHS). Apparently Hitler wrote "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.". (Mein Kempf).

Eugenics is double-eged sword. It can lead to mutilation on social basis and dubious science.

It can also mean that disabled parents won't have to bring to life disabled children, which is a great relief.

They should just mandate 1 spouse should stay at home (working remotely or not working) or you must hire a full-time nanny. I'm only half joking. If your kid has enough unsupervised time to be watching porn on a regular basis, wtf is going on?

Yeah, but that means your child cannot have unsupervised sleep or rest time.

Showers will nanny, sleeping with the parent. What next?

But I applaud your only mildly extreme idea, builds on the insanity of these lying tools well.

The solution is obviously to force CCTV inside homes, with data analyzed and hosted in a government cloud. If you are against this proposal, you support child abuse.

And no, this money couldn't be used to improve the life of families.

A modest proposal?

It is definitely not really "for the children", when legislation is aimed at all adults, and not specifically for parents. It is parents who should be responsible for the actions of their children and given the software tools to manage their online access. This arguably can be done with government sponsored and specific help for parents; software, websites, and shops with IT personnel.

These measures taken by the EU and other government entities has always been about surveillance, censorship, control, and eliminating freedom of speech and association. People need to keep calling out this continual deception and attempt to erode freedoms.

Not only in China. Russian internet cenzorship also started as a "children protection" measure.

Ursula von den Leyen has been pushing internet blocks in Germany for the sake of the children since 2009. Which is when "Zensursula" nickname has been coined. You don't need to look far to find the same thinking by the people in power.

they know mass populace is stupid and won't look behind the title. Are you against the law "protecting children"? Shame on you

>Ursula von den Leyen has been pushing internet blocks in Germany for the sake of the children since 2009. Which is when "Zensursula" nickname has been coined.

And then in a completely democratic mannner, Europeans said "that's who we want leading us".

>And then in a completely democratic mannner, Europeans said "that's who we want leading us".

No, it wasn't. She was chosen by a group of country leaders during a closed doors voting.

If it's democratic at all, it's very tangential.

I've taken that comment to be very sarcastic, but maybe it wasn't.

There's an election in the chain. Voters elected the national MPs who then selected the national PMs, who then selected von den Leyen. Democratic-ish.

After how many levels detached from the general population, does the vote stop being democratic?

It doesn’t stop being democratic. It’s just a scale from more to less democratic. America’s founding fathers were skeptical of democracy, so they provided for the president to be elected by the Electoral College, which was originally appointed by state legislatures. It’s still “democratic”—just less so than a direct election.

American people went to the polls to vote(or not) for Trump, Europeans didn't go to the polls to vote for Cenzura. Kind of a big difference on the democracy scale.

No, actually it started to protect intellectual property. A guy posted a recap in a post above.

You know, if Politicians, Law Enforcement and Military Personnel are included and affected by all these anti-privacy laws, I'm all for it (not really). Let their daily corruption come to light by the opposition exposing all their dirty laundry (because of course they'd used the data against each other) and vice-versa over and over... and that's not gonna happen because we don't live in that world where laws apply fairly to everyone.

"Rules for thee but not for me."

Europol is lobbying for this.

Of course, by using tax payers money.

It's amazing that they are spending billions on "think of the kids" problems, yet in many countries of the EU it's very hard to find a decent children playground in the city center.

I'm quite sure that if you asked parents, they would rather have the playground than the surveillance.

"...into the hands of the few..."

And there you have it, the actual reason for this.

You shouldn't have to be an "entrepreneur" to have a website. The idea that the only useful/interesting things to say are those that are profitable is a big part of the problem we find ourselves in.

or maybe just maybe its time for people to realize that the EU is an enemy of the people, and hold the people pushing for this personally responsible.

The simplest solution is perhaps to simply imprison any children found using a VPN until they reach 18, then the state can exert total control over their access to information and they can be safely released into unmoderated society on their 18th birthday.

> And if EU still think that's not enough, maybe they should just cut the cable, like what North Korea did.

I'll make a similar comment I made on another thread: we saw a thread with many upvotes hating on the cyber-libertarians... We all know the EU institutions are ran by cyber-libertarians and that it's cyber-libertarians making such research and decisions right?

Pick your fight brothers. I don't think spending your time hating on the three John Galts of this world is a worthy fight. You may even turn out to be more morally aligned with the John Galt of this world than with the people running the EU institutions (and North Korea).

The former cyber-libertarians are running the tech unicorns now. Ofc they would prefer you see them as John Galts lol. But they aren't that and they will defend freedom of cyberspace only as far as it aligns with their power and profit.

> The same way you fine drivers for traffic violation, but not the road.

Eh - my new car has an EU mandated speed limiter in it that takes over the cruise control. It uses a combination of GPS and vision to determine what speed limit to apply. Only slammed the breaks on on the motorway to drop from 120 to 80 KM/h erroneously 4 times in one journey last week.

Much like the oft maligned Google PM that releases/deprecates another chat product to get their promotion, some commissioner somewhere in Brussels managed to make the world a better place with this too.

Do you have a single link or other piece of evidence to substantiate this? I’ve never seen, nor can I find in a search, any evidence the ICP license scheme in place for that past 26 years in China has ever related to children in any meaningful sense.

It has the ring of BS. Why would an authoritarian government in a country with no free press or free elections feel any need to justify a speech regulation with a fig leaf? They openly restrict speech.

I think you’re full of it.

An authoritarian government needs excuses too. China even claims to be a democratic country. North Korea even has the word Democratic in its name. "Protecting children" is a common excuse China uses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_erotic_very_violent is a famous example of them trying to justify internet censorship under the name of "protecting children".

> In case people no longer remember, when China started to require websites to register for a license before be allowed to operate, it was for "protecting the children" too.

People don't remember because it didn't happen and the license wasn't about protecting the children. But it's so convenient to just blantantly lie on the internet nowadays, isn't it?

Just like the title of this article blatantly lies about "EU" doing something.

One of you ought to find out what really did happen, and tell us. I can only do the lame thing and quote Wikipedia:

> China had no such legislation until 1997. That year, China's sole legislative body – the National People's Congress (NPC) – passed CL97, a law that deals with cyber crimes, which it divided into two broad categories: crimes that target computer networks, and crimes carried out over computer networks. Behavior illegal under the latter category includes, among many things, the dissemination of pornographic material, and the usurping of "state secrets."

Notably, there’s nothing about children in that quote.

You're right

Prove to me that people deserve to be free and not micromanaged on a day to day basis.

> This is arguably much worse than allowing children to watch porn online, because this will for sure effect people's whole life in a negative way.

I would like you to make that argument.

What argument?

You're the one that needs to argue the presence of harm, given you're the one arguing we need to create a surveillance dragnet to shield certain age groups of humans from witnessing how their species procreates.

The default state is that humans procreate via sexual reproduction. You need to argue why we need to take action to hide this, especially given we let children witness other far more brutal activities from the human species like violence.

The argument I am asking him to make is the one about how age verification is "much worse" than "allowing children to watch porn".

If your argument in favor of that is that watching porn isn't harmful to children, then I don't understand what all that superfluous waffling about china is doing in there.

> This is arguably much worse

Surely someone claiming it's arguable should be willing to make that argument.

For me it's not that it's reproduction. Film that shows sex is not an issue as I see it and I don't know anyone that has developed serious addictions to sex in Hollywood film. However I know several people, family members included, that have absolutely obliterated their childhoods and early adult years by becoming addicted to porn. They were groomed by adults online from a young age and, although their parents tried to stop it, kids are sneakier and they got around it, exposing themselves to some truly dark things. It is not easy for families to recover from having dealt with a child with serious addiction issues.

I think it's pretty silly to argue that systemic protections are ineffective and overreach whereas the efforts of one or two parents should be enough and are the correct level of enforcement for the protection of children. The parents of the people I know went to extremes to protect their children and they were mostly unsuccessful.

Sounds like the people you describe were outliers with some preexisting conditions, and probably shouldn't be used as any sort of baseline or point of comparison.

I wouldn't think that since people who don't suffer from these issues outnumber those who do suffer, that makes this not a real issue. Consider the victims of opiate addiction, alcoholism, or sex trafficking. Are those situations so fundamentally different? How many people does one have to know with tragic childhoods for it to be a problem that people take seriously?

There's a big gap between 'some kids get addicted to porn' and 'lets agegate the internet as completely as possible'

Just to add my perspective, I am one of those outliers who is still going to therapy for porn/sex addiction that started in adolescence. Age verification wouldn't have helped me because addiction wasn't my main or only issue - I also had significant sources of stress owing to my upbringing. I could have just as easily been addicted to drugs or alcohol because of those stressors, or used a VPN. Either way I needed some form of stress relief beyond what any teen ought to need, and those were the options I saw.

Combination of abuse and unfettered access to drinks/drugs/Internet is way worse than either one alone. At the same time I think the issue of bad parenting is a) not one people talk about out loud because of stigma (we can attack tech CEOs all day for pushing addictive products but anyone can become a parent and none of them will stand to be called the "bad" one) and b) not amenable to much change save for a global in-house surveillance panopticon. Yes we can choose to place trust in parents to protect children from Instagram and PornHub, but consider that some parents just... won't. Neither can we force them to. What then?

Nobody thought to protect western millennials from accidentally wandering across porn on the internet, and we mostly grew up ok

I don't understand why porn is such a problem and an excuse. There is so much genuinely horrifying stuff on the internet - including gore, pictures and videos of all kinds of abuse, but the problem is always with people having sex on camera for money...

>I don't understand why porn is such a problem and an excuse.

Because porn is the most taboo things in public, even if a lot of people use it at home. Nobody will come and defend liberal porn access because then everyone will call you a gooner or a pedo. It'll probably be the end of your political debate.

Which means porn access can be weaponized without any political opposition. It's the perfect scapegoat to remove online anonymity disguised as "age verification".

Yes, I agree, my point was more about why is sex such a taboo, when there are things out there, that are genuinely worse. But I guess it's a bit too wide of a topic to have a productive discussion.

You misunderstood. Sex is not taboo, admitting to consuming porn to the public is.

I think the important part is that parents talk with their children about the nature of porn. It's unavoidable that they're going to run into it at some point, and I think it's important that they understand that's not what real sex is like.

I did catch my son watching porn when he was 13. We talked about it, I blocked some stuff at my router (hardly comprehensive, but mostly to make it easy to avoid the thing he was watching), and then stopped worrying about it. He's 17 now. I'm sure he knows how to find it if he wants it, but I also trust he's able to interpret it responsibly. He seems like a well-adjusted kid. I worry more about his gaming addiction, but it doesn't seem to be interfering with school anymore.

I don't have kids yet, but I remember what it was like as a teen. Now from the perspective of the adult, all that stuff about how porn supposedly damages young person's view of what real sex is like was exaggerated. In fact, porn ended up being a pretty decent educational experience for me. Definitely filled the gaps that the "responsible education" left behind. On the other hand, as a young boy I saw some very drastic self-harm pictures online and it's been with me since - almost 30 years later I still remember.

re: gaming addiction - my parents were obsessed with me being "addicted". Now, as an adult, I don't care about games anymore. Everything I have I owe to computer skills and English. What my parents didn't want to see (or couldn't?) was that at the time games were the only interesting thing to do. We were glued to the screens mostly because everything else sucked.

> I don't understand why porn is such a problem and an excuse.

It's a cultural thing

Parents can protect their children. Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet. This doesn’t affect the free exchange of ideas that my fellow countrymen enjoy.

Governments getting involved absolutely, unequivocally will be used to clamp down on the free exchange of ideas.

That wasn't the point i was asking for an argument for. What I wanted to know is how age verification is worse then allowing children to watch porn. To make that argument.

> Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet.

Are they above the age of 16? Because then you're either Amish or out of touch.

Age verification isn't the problem. It is just a tool for censorship. It's censorship which is the problem.

So to put the bricks together: Age verification is worse than allowing children to watch pornography, because age verification is censorship.

I hope you can see how that argument is not compelling.

It’s not only compelling to a lot of Americans, it’s foundational.

Age verification will be implemented as identity identification. And that means anything you read or write or watch or say will be tied to your identity, registered by the government and other organizations, and used against you as an individual.

Do you understand now? Or will you only understand when you get fired from your job and they won't tell you the reason?

> Age verification will be implemented as identity identification.

Thank you for bringing an argument.

I want to start by tackling your argument head on. What if it's not though. What if it's implemented by attestation and signatures rooted at your local national government? Nobody will be able to tie whatever you watch or write to your identity, because they won't have it. To my understanding, that's what's proposed here, and that won't feasibly lead to any of the spooky consequences you're predicting.

There's another leg to it also. "anything you read or write or watch or say will be tied to your identity" is already true right now. Google is already, at this second, tracking my every move online and using it against me in a targeted advertisement campaign to change my spending habits, but my political affiliations too. If you're truly afraid of that outcome, I believe there are much more prescient and immediate things you should oppose than this.

> signatures rooted at your local national government? > Google is already, at this second, tracking my every move online

Apparently you haven't figured out yet that these two are partners. The government restrictions are needed in order to allow other players to perform correlation tracking and deducing your identity.

> Nobody will be able to tie whatever you watch or write to your identity, because they won't have it.

This is untrue in the light of what I said above. The proposed scheme lacks any proof of immunity against tracking and deducing identity. I haven't seen anything like a proof being discussed, while an honestly implemented scheme would require a long and well publicized discussion of the means of protection - to make sure it cannot be abused for political reasons.

The lack of such a discussion is actually a proof that the purpose of the proposed scheme is precisely abuse.

I realize this thread is a half day old, but porn is like the least concerning thing I prohibit my child from consuming off the internet. I grew up on a farm, animals work just like we do. There is obviously some messed up stuff some people find enticing, but youtube kids is way more damaging than even the weird stuff. Kids mostly have standard adult disgust filters. Ytk and similar addictive feeds bypass that with things that are far more subtle.

> there are much more prescient and immediate things you should oppose than this.

We can oppose more than one thing at a time. All of these privacy invading measures should be opposed as strongly as possible. Companies like Google should be broken up by the government, the parts should not be allowed to collude with each other, and there should be laws preventing the kind of data collection they do without full transparency, user control, and ownership.

There are ways to do age verification without tying your identity to the content. A site could direct you through a proxy to the government's eID server with simply the request whether you're over 18. Because it's going through an anonymising proxy, the government has no idea what site you're visiting. You login to your eID, which confirms or denies that you're over 18. The porn site only knows what porn was watched and that the person watching is over 18. The proxy only knows someone was visiting the porn site at that particular time. The government knows who you are and that you were visiting a site at that time, but not which site.

> There are ways to do age verification without tying your identity to the content.

That's wishful thinking. The site would log that they sent you to verify your ID with your IP and a timestamp. The proxy server would get your identity with your IP and timestamp. Those two can can be linked. The government would know exactly who you are while also knowing where you came from and when.

Either the government would monitor the proxy or they'd just be running the proxy themselves or forcibly taking it over Room 641A style to log everything going in and out.

There is zero way to verify your identity to a website without trusting some third party with that information. There's no one in the US who is trustworthy enough or immune from being controlled by the US government so you'll always be vulnerable to having your identify exposed and it being used against you.

The best suggestion I've heard so far was scratch off cards that could be purchased anywhere in person, with cash, after presenting ID. The ID isn't logged or scanned, just manually checked by the wage slave at the counter. Even that isn't without challenges though since the cards would have codes that would likely be traceable to batches and where they were distributed to/purchased from which means that information can be checked against surveillance/facial ID/flock cameras to find out who bought them, and they can also be resold/shared online/exchanged/stolen/generated/given to others which means they won't be very effective at identifying individuals or keeping kids from seeing adult content.

The truth is that the entire point of these age verification laws is deanonymization, censorship, and control. Any theoretical scheme we might come up with that wouldn't allow for abuses will never be implemented for that reason.

Obviously there needs to be a desire to set this up responsibly. A government that doesn't care about privacy at all can force whatever they want. But the EU care a lot about privacy. They're got strong data protection regulation. Having sensible barriers in place can protect them from overstepping. The proxy obviously needs to be independent.

That argument is hugely compelling.

If you want the logical approach; the premise you're suggesting you want people to argue from is faulty.

The argument kicks in at a slightly deep level. Age verification is unrelated to allowing children to watch porn. Someone needs to make an argument showing that age verification would lead to blocking porn, and that argument seems to be impossible to make (age verification is a much lighter standard than the bans on torrent websites, for example, and torrenting is still as easy as it ever was). To block kids viewing porn there'd need to be a - probably global - system of censorship that exerts total control over what people can POST and GET on the internet. The likes of which we have not yet seen and would likely have catastrophically negative political consequences.

>My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet.

You sure about that? )))

Yes

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