[fluoridation]

>You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on.

I have a government ID and I didn't pay for it. I can use it to travel to nearby countries in lieu of a passport. The assumption that IDs are necessarily non-free (to the issuee) is pretty funny to me.

>it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.

The maintenance of the Internet is already paid for through ISP contracts.

[CPLX]

I mean, if you really want to make the government subsidize an ID verification scheme or mandate that certain real-world locations provide age verification as a social service for everyone, that's fine.

It's orthogonal to the discussion, though, which is about whether we should do it or not, because the costs here aren't significant and don't change the terms of the debate.

[fluoridation]

I'm personally in favor of just banning children off the Internet, but I don't agree it's orthogonal to the discussion. What I replied to was the implication that someone should pay a recurring cost to prove they're an adult for the same reason that they pay to own a computer or to connect to the Internet. Don't disown the dumb thing you said.

[CPLX]

I'm not disowning it at all. I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.

You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.

It just doesn't matter. It's not important. It's consistent with how we organize our society in general, which makes focusing on it in this one particular instance more understandable as an attempt to distract from the substantive merits of these arguments about age verification.

[fluoridation]

>I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.

Okay, but the person you replied to doesn't, and instead of providing an actual answer to their question, you posed a false equivalence between proving your age and buying a computer.

>You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.

You are purposefully muddying the waters by being lax with your use of language. The "cost" you "pay" by wearing appropriate attire in public is fundamentally different from the actual cost you actually pay when you engage in commerce; one is a trade of freedoms and the other is a trade of goods and/or services. If your argument is that the freedom you have to trade in exchange for the freedom to access the Internet, is that of not having to show an ID, that's one thing. If you also have to add a recurring monetary cost then that's another.

If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet beyond "*shrug* just 'cause, dude. Who cares?", then maybe you shouldn't have said anything.

[CPLX]

> If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet

Of course I have an answer. To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.

There's literally nothing confusing about the "why" in this discussion.

The fact that bad people use the "what about the children" argument regularly for bad reasons doesn't mean that all such arguments are bogus.

In fact, it's an indication of exactly the opposite, it's so regularly used because there is a broad consensus that we need to protect children from harm which is why it's often effective as an arguing tool.

The relevant frame for this discussion is will it work, and what are the tradeoffs. A trivially small amount of money for a simple age verification scheme isn't a particularly meaningful tradeoff against a genuine social problem. The bigger, more genuine issues are around privacy and censorship and I do in fact concede those are real.