A) 18+ content is behind a pinky swear
B) 18+ content is behind a parental control (what this bill would do)
C) The internet can't have 18+ content anymore
D) Some other system? Please describe it.
You might think you can keep 16 year olds from looking at porn, if they want to. You can't. You have never been able to. All you can do is teach them that the law is stupid and pointless, and they should treat rules with contempt. But they'll still be able to look at porn.
What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.
There are really two "core" issues at play:
1. The prudish nature of US society
2. The fact that we don't have data privacy laws and restrictions on digital surveillance by private companies
But we can't realize all the supposed glorious promise of all this tech bullcrap for education and free exploration of younger kids if we can't at least come pretty damn close to guaranteeing that an eight-year-old won't stumble on Rotten.com or hardcore porn if an adult isn't looking over their shoulder constantly. And whatever that solution is needs to work for parents who don't have the know-how or time to be sysadmins for their household.
> What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.
This is already happening. A central setting would improve privacy over the way things are right now.
B) makes things worse in several ways, but primarily by stifling innovation. Only large incumbents will have no trouble paying for the measures required to ensure compliance.
There's also the cost of enforcement, which will likely have to be borne by the taxpayers. I don't think this is a good thing to spend money on.
C) cannot be enforced, and any good faith attempts will cost more than the damage from harm they're supposed to prevent.
> Only large incumbents will have no trouble paying for the measures required to ensure compliance.
Oh my gawwwwwd. People trot this out any time any regulation is mentioned. Option B is a single easily accessible age category value. It's simpler than the status quo.
I’d say nearly 50 years is precedent enough that government intervention is unnecessary.
Kids can turn apple juice into wine in their closet
they can drive their bicycle to a drug dealer
they can rub a butter knife against the sidewalk until it's pointy
Do we need govt AI cameras in kids closets and on their bicycles? How do we verify they're cycling somewhere safe? How do we make sure they're not getting shitfaced on bootleg hooch they made with bakers yeast and a latex glove?
Rather, companies would have to submit a formal proposal to get their website listed on Kid Internet. This inverts the responsibility. It's not my cost, or your cost, it's their cost now. If they want kids, they better prove it.
Then, you can trivially configure your router or any computer, with any operating system, to use the Kid Internet DNS. It's now completely operating system and device agnostic. It can be organizational wide with the flick of a switch. It can be global, if we want.
The proposal we're seeing here is bad, bad, bad. Not just for privacy reasons, but because it will not work. Not might, will. This will not work. For many reasons:
1. Most operating systems are not going to implement some stupid ass bullshit.
2. Most websites do not give a single fuck. Porn websites will not care. Trying to play wack-a-mole is ALWAYS a losing game, no exceptions.
3. This is trivial to bypass.
4. If it's not trivial to bypass, it still will not work, but it will now be the end of computing as we know it.
How do we decide what sites resolve as part of the Kid Internet? Is there some process where a site submits itself for approval to be part of the Adult Internet?
How do we stop the government from using this to stop access to parts of the internet it doesn't like?
This proposal looks even less workable
Things were way, way, way sketchier in like 2005 than they are now and those people turned out mostly fine.
And there's plenty of examples (J&J, oil titans) escaping financial consequences by other means.
Parents have always had the ability (though maybe not explicitly the right to) control their children’s environment for the purposes of teaching personal beliefs. So long as the belief itself wasn’t deemed harmful to the child, society would allow it to continue propagate that way. Racism unfortunately has never been seen as innately harmful. It’s looked down on, yes, but not to the point of making it illegal to enforce in family life.
Protect people's rights and don't get tricked in to giving them up just cause someone has a story about a child.
"Google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the Internet before the public understood digital privacy. And now we can't get rid of it."
The public has been conditioned to expect web services free at point of use. Legitimately it's hard to monetize things like YouTube without ads, and I get that. But turning our entire ecosystem of tech into a massive surveillance mini-state seems like an astonishingly shitty idea compared to just... finding a way to do advertising that DOESN'T involve 30 shadowy ad companies knowing your resting blood pressure. My otherwise creative and amazing industry seems utterly unwilling to confront this.
Edit: Like, I don't know, am I crazy for thinking that simply because we can target ads this granularity, that it simply must be that? I get that the ad-tech companies do not want to go back to blind-firing ads into the digital ether on the hope that they'll be seen, but that's also plus or minus the entirety of the history of advertising as an industry, with the last 20 or so years being a weird blip where you could show your add to INCREDIBLY specific demographics. And I wouldn't give a shit except the tech permitting those functions seems to be socially corrosive and is requiring even further erosion of already pretty porous user privacy to keep being legally tenable.
However it appears that it takes pretty disasterous consequences for us to be able to walk anything back.
It will just decay until it’s a short squeeze into oligarchy or worse (the corrupt will be forced into an arms race of accelerating corruption as opportunity becomes scarce). Then some other country who isn’t leaving it up to their society to do the right thing will be in charge. Until the same happens to them.
This is the value of religion historically, one of the few ways of coercing a population into doing the right thing for their own good. But every group can be spoiled or hijacked by a small handful of bad actors who are willing to do what others are not.
