call and email your congresspeoples, and tell them not to go through with this
We're below replacement rate, so it's not like most people are even having kids, anyway. Yet we have to give up our freedom for other people to raise little Christian tots (or whatever the motivation for this is billed as)?
I grew up in a Deep South Protestant household. Having access to the unfiltered internet got me interested in STEM. Bumping into occasional shock sites and porn as a preteen did not turn me into a satanist cannibal.
Keeping "Kids Safe" is a LIE.
This is about putting collars on every US citizen.
They'll filter you into groups.
They'll control what loans and jobs you can get.
They'll use this information to blackmail you should you ever run for office or gain wealth or power.
This is a threat to democracy and personal liberty.
Child safety is a LIE.
2006 is on the other side of the event horizon of "Don't be evil."
Imho, that's well into the re-centralization of the internet and tech landscape.
Rewind another 10 years, and I'd call 1996 wild. That's before XMLHttpRequest/AJAX and when a cat could create as impressive of a website as any corporation.
That's not happening like this, also because peer and public tolerance for it is nearly nil.
The internet now is much safer.
Kids are safer today.
If a preteen sees a horse fucking a human they won't even know what that is.
Notice you didn't answer the question btw
Noteworthily, the legislation moves age verification from individual apps to app-store operators [Apple, Google] which reduces Facebooks legal exposure for inaccurate/incorrect age verifications.
For instance:
https://idtechwire.com/spains-pm-proposes-mandatory-digital-...
https://www.weforum.org/publications/reimagining-digital-id/
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/01/davos-agenda-digital...
Everyone ignores stuff like this because of people like Alex Jones who make it seem like a lunatic conspiracy theory. But these conferences happen, and they do influence policy. It’s not a “cabal” that issues orders—many participants are national leaders bringing their perspectives (see the link above about Sanchez)—but it does have an impact.
The banal truth is that many different world leaders have talked each other into this after years of discussion on the proper way to “manage” the Internet. They see cyberspace as a threat to top-down technocratic control and view Internet-enabled populism (aka democracy) as something to be quashed.
This has been true ever since the creation of the internet and web.
It's what the original 90s crypto wars were about: the right of individuals to access strong encryption to preserve the privacy of their communications from the government.
Absent that, pandora's box opens.
Age KYC is just the next fight against encryption and privacy dressed up in "for the children" clothes.
Strong encryption always has (and always will) facilitate criminal and illegal activity. Tough tits.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies should work within the bounds of individual rights, not adjust them for convenience.
If the price of individual freedom^ is that it's harder to track and prosecute child exploitation, drug distribution, and mass terror attacks, then that's the way it needs to be.
^ "Individual freedom" as distinct from corporate freedom. Fuck non-human legal entities' rights to access encryption, aside from on behalf of their users.
It's true that some have always seen it this way, but it's become much more salient in the current political context. The average politician 30 years ago was barely aware of what the Internet was - it wasn't a major concern. For a brief period, the prevailing (but not only, as you mention with encryption) attitude was that the information superhighway would make everyone was educated and wise as the managerial class elites. Social media muddled the picture for a while, but the Arab Spring was considered to be an amazing example of this - look, people around the world are going to be Just Like Us!
What really kicked off the current level of enmity politicians have for the Internet was the rise of right-wing populism, especially Trump. This really deeply upset a lot of people, and the only conceivable explanation is that bad actors caused it using the Internet, because good and wise people would only come to the same conclusions as themselves, and democracy is only fit for people who come to those same conclusions. It is certainly not because their policy outcomes caused discontent. Since then they've been throwing everything at the wall to stop free Internet discourse in the belief it will make the bad people go away and restore Public Order.
1. Increased centralization (FAANG et al.)
2. Larger tech entities willing (and able) to strike deals with government in exchange for favors
3. All governments always wanting more power over citizens
4. Today
It's a 'centralization breeds coercion' thing.
The antidote to that is decentralization (especially breaking up large firms) and an individual right to privacy (including the technical methods to ensure it).
Imagine DeCSS today! Facebook and Google and Microsoft and Apple would get calls, then Anthropic and OpenAI, and the key would be wiped off large portions of the internet.
Is it even possible? Will businesses my voters like and use a lot just leave my country entirely? Will companies be able to develop privacy-preserving age check infrastructure? Will the press present it as a 'Chinese-style Great Firewall' or be more supportive of it? Will the blocks all be trivial to bypass? Will the large number of porn users in my country form a cohesive voting block? Will a powerful pro-privacy, pro-free-speech lobby emerge to challenge this? And will they be backed by powerful, well-funded US interests like Facebook and Google?
Australia simply showed the world passing this sort of legislation isn't political suicide.
Representative democracy is not adequate to the demands of the information age, where the informational asymmetry between individual and state is unprecedented in history. It's time to explore other models like administrative democracy.
If they are asking you to leave a message, have your kids leave the message.
The only people who think otherwise are terminally online losers who have never organized anything larger than a birthday party.
It took a month from first letter to new bikelanes.
If someone had bothered to write to that council they'd be alive.
But by all means, keep winning online arguments and doing nothing.
The local dog catcher had more impact on your daily life than the president.
seems like a lot more people believe that than the population you are describing
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-american...
Money matters but a popular movement is more powerful still in some places look up DSA