[sam-cop-vimes]

Everyone disagreeing with this poster, are you okay with living in a society where anything goes? Do we give up trying to minimise harms because it is hard to do? The effort to regulate this sort of access has to start in some shape or form and then improved.

Come up with a better solution, provide a proof of concept and yes regulatory agencies / governments will take notice. People like us work in these agencies. Let's propose better ways of achieving the same goal of reducing porn exposure to minors - not keep bashing the initiative taken.

[arccy]

Why is that even a good goal in the first place? Must children grow up in a sterile environment coddled by a nanny state?

[sam-cop-vimes]

I don't know if you are a parent, but this is a ridiculous question. The unrestricted Internet is a cesspool. For the same reason you wouldn't allow a child to go play in an open sewer, you cannot allow them access to the unrestricted Internet.

[brainwad]

How old are you? Most millennials grew up with unfettered access to the internet, including porn, because our non-digital-native parents were easily outsmarted. We were fine. This seems like the same helicopter parenting fallacy that has already destroyed kids' in-person lives.

[sam-cop-vimes]

My kids are millenials. They are fine too, but that is only because my wife and I worked really hard to regulate their access. We caught our 7 year old son searching for some offensive stuff on the internet and when asked, his answer was "my friends are looking for it".

In his teen years, we started hearing some stuff you'd typically associate with the toxic manosphere. A number of discussions later it turned out he was picking this off the internet.

Parents who talk about the difficulty of dealing with all this are labelled as hysterical, emotional, helicopter parents...the list goes on. My only response to that is what I tell most people - don't judge parents too harshly until you've had the opportunity to be one.

[squeefers]

> For the same reason you wouldn't allow a child to go play in an open sewer, you cannot allow them access to the unrestricted Internet.

fair enough, but legislate this? why cant you just stop your own kid going on the internet? Id argue youre overblowing it but you cant ever remove the emotional/hysterical aspect when dealing with a parent

[sam-cop-vimes]

> why cant you just stop your own kid going on the internet?

May I ask if you are a parent? Because every parent knows that kids will try to cross any boundary set (which is how they learn, not a problem). If there is additional friction at each step before they access something which is harmful for them, chances are they would have matured well enough to prepare them before they are exposed to harmful content.

[NitpickLawyer]

> Come up with a better solution

Parents are responsible for their children.

[sam-cop-vimes]

Yes they are, but human beings live in a society and we look out for each other. Sayings such as "it takes a village to raise a child" isn't just a pithy quote. Any parent will tell you from their lived experience that it is true.

Most parents do a reasonably good job of regulating the physical environment their child exists in. At the same time, a lot of parents are out of their depth keeping up with all the threats that exist on the Internet.

Like with security of systems, there has to be defense in depth against these threats to children. Regulation is one of them. Parental efforts are another.

[Aloisius]

It takes less than 3 minutes to set up the free, built-in parental control software in all major operating systems.

This isn't a situation where a parent is so overloaded that they need a village to help raise a child. This is just parents who have decided not to do anything.

But if we're going to go the village route, how about we send someone from say, a child welfare organization to visit every house with a child to walk parents/guardians through setting up the software on their devices - maybe with regular follow-ups to ensure the child's well-being in neglectful households that did not already have such software set up.

[Shugarl]

I think the one problem about this train of thoughts is that it makes people overly willing to accept any kind of solution, as fast as possible, because what could be more important than protecting our children. It makes people completely ignore or dismiss the potential problems this will create down the line, especially because we tend to be good at ignoring things that do not affect us yet. This whole thing feels both rushed and extremely short sighted.

[sam-cop-vimes]

How is this rushed though? This is the first attempt at regulating this after two decades of "anything goes".

[Lio]

Sorry but I'm going to keep bashing the initiative because:

1. It doesn't stop kids from accessing porn because kids know about or can learn about free VPNs.

2. I think it exposes lots of adults to identity theft on non-porn websites by normalising compulsory ID checks. e.g. on Spotify, Bluesky, Reddit, etc. I think it's a matter of time before phishing sites start making use of this.

I think the implementors of this law either knew about these issues or are hopelessly naive.

Given that and the push for digital IDs at the same time I think they are bad actors and I question their motivation.

[sam-cop-vimes]

> I think the implementors of this law either knew about these issues or are hopelessly naive.

Or they decided that, on balance, there is still a net benefit to this starting point.

Doing nothing is not an option - the unregulated Internet is a cesspool. We've allowed children unregulated access to this for a couple of decades now. The argument that we cannot regulate this to protect kids, so we should just accept the damage it is doing is not acceptable any more.

Yes, effective regulation takes time to formulate. But you have to start somewhere and improve the situation.

[tavavex]

Your comment has two separate messages that, despite not technically contradicting one another, don't really relate to each other in any way.

1. The current status quo has been the default that's been in place for 20-30 years now

2. Despite this, the situation is so dire right now (did something new happen recently? Worldwide?) that we must do something about it now now now - even if that oversteps and takes away rights, even if it sells off your most private data to random third parties, even if it establishes a framework for broader censorship, doing something NOW is so important that it must trample all other concerns

My whole generation grew up on unrestricted internet, and while I agree that it's not the ideal situation, the experience I and everyone else I know had over these decades suggests that it's not the apocalyptic catastrophe that everyone pretends it to be. Something should be done, but it must be done carefully and in moderation as to avoid censoring and limiting adults in an attempt to make the entire internet child-first.

Instead, what we're seeing is half of the first world suddenly remembering about this after 20 years and steamrolling ahead in complete lockstep. Does this not worry you in any way? And look at what each one is proposing. Why are there no middle-ground privacy-first proposals anywhere? For some reason, those are confined to research papers and HN posts, not policy. Even without thinking of complicated cryptography and tokens and whatnot, think of this: what if ISPs were legally mandated to ship their routers in "child-censored mode" to everyone but businesses and households with no children? They would filter out all the websites that Ofcom or whatever other agency decides are inappropriate for children, but the router owner/operator could go in the settings and authorize individual devices for full internet access.

But that would place the burden of filtering appropriate content on the government, rather than every website in the world - and it wouldn't allow them to extract money via lawsuits and fines. More importantly, it also doesn't allow them to do favors and subcontract benevolent third-party businesses to store and process every user's identity in association with what they visit. I'm betting it's because of those reasons that any privacy-friendly approaches are a complete non-starter.