[jmacc93]

Every time I see stuff about age verification (which I do admit is likely just a justification for control and surveillance over the internet) I can't help but wonder if there's some way to coordinate a large enough number of internet users to adopt a parallel internet that inherently cannot be regulated, or at least one in which no law can be reasonably enforced. For instance a fully encrypted p2p internet. I guess ultimately the problem is banks and other tie-ins to the real world like businesses with public reputations. And so I guess since endless content streams (including porn and other child-unfriendly media) follow the money primarily, any non-monetized / volunteer parallel internet would likely contain mostly unmonetized content like information (eg: wikipedia, Q&A sites, etc) and slow, un-gameable social media

In a perfect world, I'd prefer law and regulation minimization, but obviously that's just not reasonable in our actual world. As much as I have libertarian tendencies, I just can't argue that regulation is necessary. The really interesting part is which regulations are the ones you actually need, which do more harm than good, and which should be refactored -- all as measured (probably) by something like counterfactual real world preference (in the best case, at least). My sense (which isn't worth much; only should act on empirical evidence and falsification-resistant modelling) is such a parallel internet, plus an analogous parallel economy (like bitcoin), would be a net positive

[ibejoeb]

In most of the developed world, you need to register with a government to operate a communications device, whether it's radio, land line, mobile phone, whatever. If you're theorizing some kind of peer-to-peer system, where you let someone use your service to bypass mandatory registration, you're going to be liable. There will be very limited takers.