| These "economic freedoms", specifically the actions of so-called "tech" companies with respect to the internet, are the cause of "age verfification" legislation The original internet had rules against using it for commercial activity It lacked "economic freedoms" FWIW I still found it worth using at the time, despite no so-called "tech" companies It also lacked websites of unmanageable size with hundreds of millions of pages of user-generated content used as bait to lure in ad targets for data collection and surveillance, so-called "platforms" or "social media" It lacked "age verification" to access those websites because those websites did not exist There will be at least one HN reply arguing that the original internet sucked, or some other brainless dismissal As if the internet we have now does not suck. Clearly, it does suck for some people It is not a lack of "economic freedoms" on the internet that has led to "age verification". It's quite the opposite |