Hacker News Reader

Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the argument here. You can easily adjust the law to force verification.

You seem to assume that "this is now final, nothing will change after that". Why would you assume this to be the case?

But they could also just implement verification now, which many governments are trying to do. The idea that you shouldn't let a government do one thing because they might do another thing is flawed if they could already do the other thing.

The danger of a slippery slope comes when one change enables the next change - for example, a law mandating certain kinds of data collection enables a future decision to discriminate or control based on the collected data. But in this case, no data is being collected, there's no step happening here that enables a more dangerous later step.

If anything, I'd argue this makes it harder to implement more invasive measures later, because rather than arguing that some form of age control is necessary, Illinois will specifically need to argue that age verification is necessary over the existing anonymous system. That's harder than saying "there is no protection for children right now, age verification is the only way forward".

'AnimalMuppet has the right take upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249774): "Once you accept their right to ask, then you open the door to their right to a truthful answer, and thus to a verified answer.

> But they could also just implement verification now, which many governments are trying to do.

That itself is a proof: the voluntary age declaration was and is common on all the services that governments are now trying to force to do age verification, and it wasn't enough.

EDIT: in more general terms, and going beyond age verification thing and over many recent developments in information security, the Internet as a culture is missing an on-line equivalent to a key real-life social feature: the ability to answer with a shocked "gross!", followed by slapping the asker in the face.

Nope. It's a stupid take. Especially considering over half of the US states have jumped right to looking for that verified answer but no one on HN gives a shit when red states do things. They only ever bitch and moan when a blue state is doing something far less invasive and then they have to turn it into a conspiracy theory that the blue states are secretly trying to do what the red states are just blatantly doing in the open with zero push back.

But we already accept their right to ask. Certain websites have had age restrictions on them for years. There's nothing new to the idea that certain media is not permitted to certain age ranges. (This is leaving aside the idea that people generally agree that age restrictions and age verification are perfectly fine in public spaces in the physical world, and that the internet is very much an anomaly in this regard.)

Moreover, nothing really seems to have changed in the enforcement of that (as far as I understand, specifically focusing on laws like Illinois') — it's still ultimately the responsibility of parents to ensure their own child doesn't access restricted websites. This legislation would essentially provide a mechanism that makes it easier for parents to do that.

So no, I don't think that that is the right take.

I also find your edit somewhat amusing, as the key reason that age verification is such a topic is because of a different missing real-life social feature, which is the ability to look at someone and identify whether they're an adult or a child, alongside the ability to look at someone's ID without recording all their personal details forever. As they used to say, on the internet, no-one knows if you're a dog, which is both a strength and a weakness. Identifying mechanisms like this (ensuring parents have more control over their own computers, but not requiring full verification anywhere) seems like a reasonable approach to fixing some of the weaknesses of internet anonymity, while still preserving the basic strength that identifying yourself is always opt-in.

The slope is only slippery if the change in question makes it easier for future changes to be bad. Otherwise you're only arguing for no changes to ever be made. Does this law make forced verification easier than if this law didn't exist?

Seems so - it builds in the verification infrastructure requirement, making it dead simple to change whether it is opt in or opt out at any time.

It's actually pretty hard not to have a change be part of a slippery slope. It requires including blocks for further behavior as any subset implementation is hard to sell as not being a slippery slope path otherwise.

Potentially. The existence of the law exemplifies the idea the law is there to protect someone; all you need then to upgrade it is to argue that the current method is insufficient protection. Spirit of the law has been established - letter of the law will follow.

Once you go up the first step of a ladder, the second step is now easier. It's a shifting of the Overton window. You can't enact full surveillance in one move - no-one would accept that. You can boil the frog over a few decades, though.

As someone who's pushed on a technical law change.... "easily" DEEPLY, DEEPLY misstates the challenges of getting the law changed. Fun fact: people who oppose something tend to get in the way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com