[ddtaylor]

Those are examples of software people choose to use voluntarily. The context here is government removing that choice and forcing you to use something under the conditions they set.

I'm sure there are parental controls for many that go too far or not far enough. A reminder of why the government trying to solve parenting problems is likely to fail like most of their other attempts, such as failing to stop people from growing plants.

[dzikimarian]

I agree to some extent, but who should make parental controls reasonable then? What corporations deliver is both invasive and ineffective.

[ddtaylor]

The market decides. Google and Apple both compete and there are other disruptors. I worked on an education product in 2018 and it would contact third-party services like Khan Academy or Duolingo. And if a child had not earned enough measurable results, they would be unable to access non-educational content.

[dzikimarian]

Market is two companies who do not compete in this area at all, because Google literally earns on monetizing attention and Apple since Jobs era uses children as part of the strategy to lock you down in their ecosystem (see emails they had to make available to the court). There are zero serious disruptors and chance they'll appear gets smaller, because of push for device attestation being required for more and more apps.

Making children do an hour of Duolingo before they access open internet is hardly the goal. It's more about limiting their exposure to brain rot content. Existing tool would require you to block it domain-by-domain.

Honestly I can't see less invasive solution for that tool to work than page broadcasting age-rating with http response and device being aware it's owned by minor and refusing to display it.