[highwaylights]

I actually think the .xxx TLD plan from a few years ago was about the best version of this legislation that could exist - essentially adult content would be limited to a certain subset of blockable TLDs. If a site is showing adult content and not on an adult TLD, it risks a state-level block until it's compliant.

This seems much easier to police, gives 80% of what the legislators are trying to achieve, and doesn't require entrusting KYC to a bunch of dodgy websites.

Sure, it won't block VPNs and there would be problems at the start while things migrate, but if realistically your goal is to keep kids off adult websites then it's at least more reasonable than this proposal to entrust the parents/guardians with some amount of responsibility to make sure the safeguards can't be circumvented on their kids' devices.

[jampekka]

There's no way of getting kids from getting porn if they really want it. We had plenty of VHS and magazine porn as kids even though shops didn't sell them to kids.

Current mainstream porn sites curate off the most hardcore stuff quite well. The dark web versions that will pop up due to draconian KYC will definitely not have such curation.

[kelseyfrog]

I'm not a big fan of this form black or white thinking. We could apply this to guns, bombs, drugs and conclude that it was pointless to reduce numbers.

In it's extreme form, a sufficiently motivated teenager built a homemade neutron source[1] therefore we shouldn't control nuclear material. I just don't think this argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is valid. Is there a better way of reformulating it?

1. Silverstein, K. (2005). Radioactive boy scout: The frightening true story of a whiz kid and his homemade nuclear reactor. Turtleback Books.

[jampekka]

I didn't say there should be no restrictions for guns, bombs, drugs or even porn, even though they can't be fully rooted out.

The problem is the thinking that they can be rooted out. War-on-Porn would have just as horrible effects as War-on-Drugs has.

As for porn, I think the potential effects of it to kids are way overblown. Children should be educated (age appropriately of course) about sexuality so they can handle the stuff and situations they will see at some point anyway.

[gambiting]

>>age appropriately of course)

UK research into this is staggering though - children as young as 8 already report having seen porn, and learn behaviours from it. I also support the need for full, open, completely honest and comprehensive sex education, but there's a reason why even the most liberal programs in the world don't teach 8 year olds explicitly about sex other than mentioning it very broadly - 8 year olds are not ready to learn about all the details yet(this is an opinion of child psychologists, not my own), but obviously with porn you sidestep all of it, kids don't even get the chance to learn properly.

Part of it is obviously the fault of parents - a lot of whom are completely incompetent and who probably shouldn't use any electronic devices themselves, much less give them to children. But the sheer prevelance of porn is also a problem.

I don't know what the solution to this is. Definitely not what the government is suggesting, that's for sure.

[pas]

The solution is to fix those parents, as you mentioned, who are the sources of the problem.

They are the ones who can set up parental controls on devices, but don't. Or could not give unsupervised screen time to kids, but of course do, because it's convenient.

And of course fixing them would require changing a lot of things, like income inequality and funding a lot of family support programs, and in general shifting a significant chunk of the economy away from dumb shit to education. (By taxing the dumb shit and then using that as income.)

But of course a lot of those current parents don't want this either.

[kelseyfrog]

It's important to clarify why you think this standard applies to the things I've mentioned, but not to porn. There's some decision-making going on that isn't apparent.

I think porn is underblown, so it seems like we're at a bit of an impasse.

[jampekka]

> It's important to clarify why you think this standard applies to the things I've mentioned, but not to porn.

I do think this standard applies to porn, and e.g. the .xxx TLD wouldn't be KYC. And probably wouldn't cause as big a dark web porn explosion.

For me porn is in a bit different category from guns and bombs, and from drugs too. Guns and bombs and some drugs kill. Porn probably borns if something.

[kelseyfrog]

It kinda sounds like our differing perspectives are the biggest factors on the social effects of porn and subsequently our openness to compensating actions. Does that sound suspicious at all?

[akira2501]

> We had plenty of VHS and magazine porn as kids even though shops didn't sell them to kids.

Having second hand access and having direct access to a market are entirely different things. The fact that the secondary access might in some cases exist is not an excuse to punt on the actual primary problem.

> The dark web versions that will pop up due to draconian KYC will definitely not have such curation.

If we measured legislation by it's ability to perfectly secure a market, we would have no legislation at all. Fortunately, we can measure the positive impacts of things and compare them, and I suspect, that there are actually significant positive benefits to creating some form of limiting legislation here.

It's also the case that draconian KYC implementations aren't the only way to solve this problem, in this case, I believe it's lazy or ideologically possessed politicians who want to use this as an excuse to implement these laws for other purposes.