[globular-toast]

Get children off the internet. Seriously. This is an adult place and it's insane that we ever let them on. Children aren't allowed in adult places for very good reasons. Not just for them, but for us too. Children ruin adult places, as can be see here.

Letting a child on the internet should be considered abuse in the same way as letting them into a strip club or drug-taking establishment would be.

There must be ways to allow children to learn to use computers and information technologies without letting them anywhere near the internet. It's just extreme laziness on our part that we don't bother trying.

But, of course, the children argument is the real strawman here. Nobody is interested in the above solution because this is really about preventing adults from using the internet as they currently do.

Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of the stuff the internet enables is abhorrent and harmful but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater here.

[HeckFeck]

This is the real answer - we'd think it mad if someone proposed that children play with pedal cars on open motorways. And madder still if someone else proposed the solution to the danger was to make motorways 'safer' for children in their Smobys at the expense of every adult motorist.

[kulahan]

I wonder how difficult it would be to convince people that children only need access to certain sites, like wikipedia, encyclopedia brittanica, wolfram alpha, etc., and that you need to reach a certain age to get access to the wider internet.

Even if it's not something enforced, it would be a nice social opinion.