[lifestyleguru]

I'm afraid the only way to introduce children is by whitelisting. Service by service, website by website, video by video. Giving them a smartphone with WiFi is like filling cabinet next to their bed with cigarettes, snickers bars, and painkiller pills.

[nine_k]

I did not limit internet access for my children, past certain age. Instead, my children asked me to protect them from disturbing content sometimes. (So I did, setting up an age filter on YouTube.)

Most of the time, unless you yourself don't eat snickers bars non-stop while chain-smoking, your children won't, too. Children do what their parents do, not what their parents tell them to do.

[James_K]

I agree somewhat. Ideally, the internet wouldn't be addictive at all, and hence wouldn't be an issue for children or adults. A whitelist seems reasonable for the current state of the internet, but I can't think of anything beyond Wikipedia that you could put on it. That said, you still run into the more fundamental issue of what exactly is adult content? Violence, gore, and gambling certainly, though I'm not sure casinos should be legal at all. But I struggle to justify it for porn. It's probably more healthy for children to have access to some kind of pornography.

[buu700]

That might actually be the lesser evil here. There could be a new category of "kid-friendly" devices which require parental unlock to (temporarily) access the open Internet, either in general or outside of a government-approved whitelist. Such a whitelist might include things like YouTube Kids, kid-friendly subsets of app stores / package repositories, reputable news sources, informational and educational sources, and filtered versions of search engines.

Then there's the enforcement model to consider. Maybe it's just an option consumers have available for purchase at their own discretion. Or maybe vendors would be banned from knowingly selling non-kid-friendly devices to minors, and/or parents would be banned from allowing their kids to own non-kid-friendly devices.

If this is the direction society wants to go in, it shouldn't impose on anyone other than parents and children. Current legislation and proposals narrowly target one specific use case (porn), and do so in a kludgy way that's effectively just banning its use without a VPN. Instead, this approach would provide a general framework for filtering kids' interaction with technology.

For example, some states might use it to ban social media and AI chatbots for children, at least in their current forms. I could imagine an alternative AI chatbot service being allowed which shared the history with parents and teachers, so as to deter cheating, and to provide an opportunity for human adults to add context or corrections to any misinformation. I could also imagine allowing more limited social networks that segregated schools or classes into their own private bubbles, wiped content at the end of each school year, blocked posting images/videos without parental approval, used uncomplicated news feed algorithms, and gave teachers and staff reddit-style moderation power.

Personally, I'm not sure how much I like this, vs simply leaving the parenting to parents. Maybe it would be less bad than alternatives, but it's also dangerously close to a ban on general-purpose computing[1]. We'd have to remain vigilant to ensure that governments didn't use it as a foothold to start cracking down on adults' use of computers and the Internet in the future.

1: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html