[ParksNet]

I fear this will be a stalking horse for full digital identity, and eventually squashing all anonymous speech.

The best solution here would be to force all adult sites to require a minimum monthly payment from a credit card. Blocks underage users and helps tackle addiction.

[out-of-ideas]

No, the best solution is to have parents actually monitor their kids use of said internet connected devices. Or pull the plug after certain hours

[LinuxBender]

I agree it could be a stalking horse as things often are. Can't just boil the frogs.

On the other hand I do not agree that people should require credit cards. For ages there has been a single line HTTP header that can be added to a site or even to the meta-data in HTML itself to identify adult content. A law could require all user-content sites to implement the header and require all browser apps, operating systems, mobile devices to make a best-effort attempt and requiring a parental control system that approve-lists domains that have the adult content header.

A panel of the best UX designers in the industry could draft the RFC for device/browser updates and the law could reference the RFC. A panel of parents could test the beta versions.

In NGinx it looks like this:

    location / { add_header Rating 'RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA'; }

In HAProxy it looks like this:

    http-response set-header Rating "RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA"

I do not know how to add this to Envoy or Caddy.

This puts the control and liability of the approval on the parent and they don't even need to be technically savvy at all. This also puts the liability to self-label a site on the site owner/administrator and they can each have instructions in a standard location on the site how to enable parental controls in apps/devices after such a law requires devices to have this functionality created in a standard and simple way that just looks for the header. Despite being meant for adult content there is nothing stopping this from being used for user-generated content domains. The end goal would simply be to provide a method of parental controls per domain or globally.

Most important, this method provides zero tracking of who is into what and does not leak financial or PII data.

How to enforce this? Crawlers find user generated site, people submit user generated sites. No header? 3 attempts are made to contact the domains admin/technical contact. 4th attempt domain(s) are seized.

[cvalka]

1. Your idea compelling the websites to provide the header will survive the 1st amendment scrutiny. I support this. 2. Your idea compelling the client software to respect the header will probably not survive the 1st amendment and is not really needed. Google/Apple will ship this functionality on their own. 3. Seizing domains is not universal. How will you seize an .am or .su domain? 4. One more anti porn idea to throw some meat to the evangelical base - remove copyright protection for porn. 1. Constitutional 2. Does not restrict freedom of speech 3. Removes incentives to produce new "professional" porn

[LinuxBender]

Seizing domains is not universal. How will you seize an .am or .su domain?

In theory I would use the over-sized hammer of sanctions. Not perfect, not nice but it gets results.

Your idea compelling the client software to respect the header will probably not survive the 1st amendment

I don't think it has to. There are plenty of controls on the internet that could be seen as interfering with speech such as forbidding kiddie-porn or threats of harm against people. I believe empowering parents to block porn does not in any way interfere with the U.S. constitution. The owner of a device still has the choice to allow or block whatever they wish. But I am not a supreme court judge. We should test this.

remove copyright protection for porn

There enlies the rub. That would remove most incentives to produce commercial porn. This leaves only self hosted amateurs and probably then even a sub-set... probably mostly exhibitionists as they can no longer make significant amounts of money from it, probably just some donations to get the actors to do custom things. Great for voyeurs however would quickly get boring for many others. "Put shoe on head" would still be a thing

[ttyprintk]

I’m sure a lawyer would have a better explanation, but I think the trick we rely on is that copyright is a Federal consideration and obscenity is locally defined. In court, a copyright infringement case cannot proceed if the material is obscene. What’s obscene in, say, Louisiana, might not be in Texas.