I think the problem with this debate in general is that people aren’t recognizing the harm, and are clinging on to old ideas about how the world should work, ideas that just don’t acknowledge the reality of how things change as technology changes, or even just spreads. Rejecting the idea that there are harms, and thus nothing should be done, just ensures you don’t have a seat at the table at all when it comes to the inevitable decision to do the regulation.
Meta, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc can afford to pay for and deal with licensing. They also created these issues and would very much prefer not to have to mitigate the harm they do to adults (i.e. people with money to spend). Furthermore, it'd be great if they didn't have to worry about small time competitors emerging and growing too fast. Licensing under the guise of "think of the children" is perfect for them.
However, the other harm is the recent IDScan hack which leaked 153M people's IDs. And regulation is not a solution here, we don't know how to implement a regulatory regime that will prevent these sorts of privacy disasters. Even if IDScan gets fines which kill the company (and I suspect they will not) it's not enough of a deterrent because no one will pay enough to actually provide proper security here.
Meanwhile, the age flag in the operating system will be used for other forms of authoritarian control. It will have actually accomplished nothing other than limiting peoples' fundamental civil liberties.
Leaving it all completely deregulated and/or letting platforms implement it themselves to varying levels of success and personal invasion feels like the worst option to me.
"an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information." is no different to "turn on age lock?" that you see on website now. It requires the parent to be present, engaged and 1 step ahead of their kids, and if we could depend on that, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time rebuilding custom kernels and installing Puppy, DSL and other niche small operating systems on whatever random bits of hardware I could come across. I assume a lot of other HN users did the same. My parents would have had no opportunity to set the flag, meaning everywhere would have to assume default locked/blocked.
> This, as noted above, requires that services respect the flag, which they do not universally do today. That requires legislation, something that will be a part of any workable solution.
This is advocating for a variety of closed internet that is legally locked by default and would require a level of legal and international cooperation that would never happen. I'd argue that the resulting network isn't the Web any more.