For example, it seems to me there is a whole lot of worry around megacorporations, often related to capitalism and the inequalities it brings.
In that context, if you don't place privacy as a priority, how are you not either stupid or ignorant? Is my premise just wrong?
It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected. Except of course ideas for forcing OS behavior coming out of California which are obviously bad.
I actually think things could be a lot simpler if we just made the laws like alcohol: it's illegal (with criminal liability) for a non-parent adult to provide <restricted thing> to a child. Simple enough. Seems to work fine as-is for Internet alcohol purchases. Businesses dealing in restricted industries can figure out how to avoid that liability. That's entirely compatible with making it illegal for businesses to stalk everyone, which we should also do!
The best way (and only way) to prevent retaining information is to not share them in the first place.
> You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children.
There are other method to achieve this without mandatory identification. You can force these content to be served with an HTTP header providing their legal minimum age of consultation or type of content, and blocking them browser side. Governments could maintain filter lists for different age bracket and release them to everyone, allowing easy compliance on the device parental control settings.
And actually I think it's a better world where kids can obtain e.g. a raspberry pi that they completely control no questions asked and free public wi-fi exists all over, and the onus is on service providers to not deal with children if they're not supposed to. Basically, a high trust society.
In any case, "don't retain records" is actually a pretty easy task. Trivial, actually (use a device with no disk to handle PII, an API that just returns yes/no to the rest of the system, and heavily restrict the firewall, e.g. no outbound connections). Or you buy a token/gift card in person with ID check. If you think the penalties aren't steep enough to get compliance, just raise them (e.g. business ending fines plus jail time).
You can make intentional targeting illegal without criminalizing the accidental. And mandating self categorization of content by service providers would enable standardized filtering that was broadly effective.
The above won't get kids off of social media and it won't serve the purposes of the surveillance state but it will meet the stated goals of those pushing these measures.
Keeping children off of social media is a much trickier problem. I think we'd be better served by banning certain sorts of algorithmic feeds.
They're not actually owed a solution for how to make their business model work. They can just be told that what they're doing is unacceptable, and they can figure out what they'd like to do next. If you're worried they might react with some other unacceptable thing, we can clarify that that's not okay either.
The early Internet users weren't people who subscribed to AOL to look at porn in the 90's. They were the people who were granted access to the ARPANET to work in the 80's. The Internet was an exclusive community back then. You had government employees, knowledge workers, and elite university students who had all passed institutional screening processes. You were only allowed to use the ARPANET if you were using it to do something useful and aligned. Therefore you could feel reasonably assured that anyone you talked to online was going to be better than the average person you'd find going outside and walking down the street. If you wanted to know who they were, you could just finger their username. If you wanted to know who owned a domain, you could whois it, get their name and then even write them mail or call them.
People have wanted that old Internet back for a long time. i.e. the one that existed before Eternal September. Those are the people who run your tech companies. The ones who remember what it was like. These people understand what people actually want isn't always the same thing as what they say they want. They understand why the only truly successful Internet spaces on the modern Internet are the ones like Facebook that got people to be non-anonymous. Another example is the best places to work that folks desperately want to get into are the companies like Google whose intranets are much more like the old Internet. These are really the only Internet spaces that normal people want to use. Because people want to interact with other people who are similar to them. Because people want to know who other people are. Otherwise we can't operate as the social creatures that evolution designed us to be. I don't think any civilization in history has operated its public square as a gigantic red light district where everyone is required to wear a mask. So why should we?
Overcoming the anonymous religion problem that somehow glommed onto the hacker and cyberpunk movements is more important and urgent now than it's ever been, because the Internet has been filling up with billions of AI agents. It's gonna be Eternal September in overdrive. Humanity is really facing a tradeoff where you'll have to have gatekeeping again and won't be allowed to conceal who you are, or you can be gaslit by machines forever in your own robot fantasy.
