[jmyeet]

That's a completely unhelpful, overly simplistic straw man argument.

We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction), allowing predators to interact with children,, manipulating children through advertising and algorithms, flaming harmful behaviors like eating disorders, allowing mass cyberbullying and so on.

So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed. The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.

I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors. This will take away the financial incentive for these platforms to create addictive behaivors in minors. And most of these tech platforms have already built the infrastructure to do this. You don't allow advertisers to target an audience based on (actual or inferred) ages under 18. You extend that to proxies for age, like an interest in Minecraft. And you make advertising to children illegal.

Arguably, I'd go further and restrict certain features for minors, such as comments on Youtube and an algorithmic feed.

At the moment nobody is solving anything because it's simply a fight to move liability to someone else. Meta wants hardware vendors to be responsible because, guess what?, they have no hardware platform. Apple and Google likely want app to have to deal with it for the complete opposite reason.

I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.

[akersten]

What's simplistic and unhelpful is falling for the narrative that infinite scroll, boobies, and algorithmic feeds are somehow more harmful than ubiquitous government surveillance of the most powerful communication tool on earth. The Internet, more or less, has been around 30+ years and the Something awful and 4chan generations are now in charge. We're not much worse off. The Internet is actually way tamer these days than it used to be.

We can all agree that yeah sure this social media stuff isn't great, but that's the whole point of freedom. Fast food isn't great either but lawmakers aren't pushing for a junk food attestation framework to make sure you don't consume it more than twice a week. In other words, your best interest is not interesting to them at all. They are happy that you think it is somehow self evident that we should subject ourselves to undue surveillance through!

So, wonder why they're pushing for this so hard. I'll take the brainrot if it means criticism and ideas can spread without permanently being associated with a trackable, unchanging identity.

[dgroshev]

Algorithmic scroll is factually more harmful, regardless of the amount of harm as long as it's non-zero, because it does affect people. Surveillance on its own, doesn't. It just doesn't, everything that you can think of in response is not solely or even significantly caused by surveillance.

Instead, limiting surveillance (which in this case is only linked to the issue at hand with what's explicitly a conspiracy theory, so the link is quite tenuous) was originally meant to limit the government's powers as a form of control over the government. Control over the government is just a part of the Enlightenment project of societies being able to shape their destinies equitably, which includes shaping political arrangements.

Americans have completely lost the ability to shape their political system (when was the last constitutional amendment passed again?), so instead the discourse turned to fetishising particular tools that might help, but were never the point of having freedom. This is a fallacy.

There are straightforward ways to have age verification without descending into a dictatorship. To use an analogy, most European countries have mandatory IDs, some even have digital IDs; many of those counties are freer than the US.

Freedom is being able to stop kids from accessing pornhub without fearing a dictatorship because you can just prevent the dictatorship through a million other means. Freedom is not paralysing the political system as technology and progress (and multi-billion dollar megacorporations) march on.

Otherwise societies just get superficial "freedoms" (like using slurs in public spaces because "free speech") while their governments, say, run a paramilitary murdering political opponents on the street.

[SecretDreams]

Don't know about boobies, but I would guess META/other infinite scroll products are this generation's cigarettes in terms of long term harm and we do a severe disservice to all young people that are exposed to this product. Moreover, asking parents to intervene is obviously not going to work because they, themselves, have been partially ruined by it and lack the critical thinking required to intervene and the prowess to execute. Same reason why we needed government to intervene for cigarettes.

I am not endorsing removing all anonymity from being online, but continuing the status quo with social media is a non starter for humanity. So tell me how we can help kids not get ruined by the internet without a mechanism specifically identifying that they're online in the first place?

[0x000xca0xfe]

Then the solution could be just like the solution to tobacco addiction: tax social media companies HARD, tax all advertising on social media 10x, 20x, or ban advertising on/for social media outright, ban advertising of kids products, ban showing use of social media in movies not rated 18, ... the problem will vanish just like cigarettes.

But no, that's not what governments are doing. They want control and surveillance.

[matheusmoreira]

Taxing or banning advertising alone would fix literally everything that is wrong with the web.

[akersten]

> I would guess

It's going to take a lot more evidence to get me anywhere near consideration that this is a trade worth making. Again, we know that fast food can be attributed to hundreds of thousands of early deaths per anum, but we regulate that not at all. In fact it's sadly a staple of the average kids diet.

Passing laws out of fear is not how any competent legislature should operate.

[jolmg]

> We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos.

These are not equivalent. Restricting access to a casino just requires showing an ID to a person. A few seconds later and that person has completely forgotten everything about you. They will not keep a record of your home address, etc. Perfectly privacy preserving. You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.

I don't think anyone here minds restricting access, but that doesn't require completely destroying ownership rights over our own devices nor internet and device privacy.

All that really needs to be done is for servers to publish what type of content they show from a parental perspective in a machine-readable format and for devices to have parental controls that only allow access to servers that publish such info and which content is allowed by the parental settings.

This should be even more effective than solutions requiring uploading IDs since there's still going to be servers out there in other jurisdictions that simply don't care for such things.

[audunw]

> You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.

The problem is that so many people here look at this purely from a USA perspective.

An age check in many European requires no uploading of any ID. It’s an API call toward an ID service, it will tell you which data the service gets access to, and there’s strict regulations and liability around data retention.

I’m not concerned about the government. If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What we have now is the naive idea that just by not doing ID check, government surveillance is a solved problem in the free democratic world. It’s not. Avoiding ID checks just makes the problem worse because it makes the regular person complacent. The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. Requiring audits of large corporations. Solutions that give corporations access to only the data they absolutely need and nothing else (the lack of such things is how we end up by uploading whole ID documents)

[jolmg]

> The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked.

We can't get perfect privacy so we should normalize not having any? Leave it to the government we're distrusting to handle our privacy?

> If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway.

What is this logic? Let's not worry about creeping there because if they want it they'll force it? That's not how it works. Getting to a surveillance state needs acceptance. To get that, rather than dropping people in boiling water, you slowly heat the pot, which is what this is.

[monk_grilla]

Any time I've been in an age-restricted venue here in Australia they have taken a picture of me and my ID at the door.

[knollimar]

do parents not control routers and cell plans? I feel like it would be easy to look here for header based solutions. They probably exist tbh. Then just ban your kid from VPNs.

[txrx0000]

> So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.

The market failure to provide an adequate solution wasn't natural. It was engineered by the tech companies and you are playing right into their hands. There is still a way to fix this from the root with software antitrust: force hardware vendors to ship their devices without an operating system.

Here's a more detailed explanation in a past comment about how the problem came to be in the first place, and why software antitrust can solve it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

[matheusmoreira]

> So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.

Absolute bullshit. This "unfettered access" is the whole reason why I am who I am today, why I am here. Not only did it not fail, it's in fact so successful it threatens the powers that be, and that's the real reason why they want to ban it.

> I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors.

Now this I agree with. I would be even more radical. It's not just advertising "to minors", all advertising needs to get banned straight up. Advertising is mind rape. Ban it and all the problems with the web will be fixed literally overnight, including the problems "mandated hardware attestation" aims to solve. There is no need whatsoever for this attestation nonsense.

[smallerize]

We must do something.

This is something.

Therefore, we must do this.

[xg15]

What you're saying is correct - but it's used to push a much more comprehensive lockdown of devices that has absolutely nothing to do with protection of minors.

It's as if the government first let businesses install slot machines at every street corner, then suddenly went "I'm shocked, shocked! that we have a massive epidemic of gambling addiction here, we have to mandate anti-gambling shock collars for everyone to tackle this urgent problem! There is no alternative!"

[jmyeet]

This is the slippery slope fallacy and people in tech seem to love this argument. And you can argue in whichever direction you want with it.

For example, "unfettered Internet access is just a series of tubes (shout out to Ted Stevens for that one) for pedophiles to rape your children." So now what? Is it your hyperbole against mine?

The problem is that people are operating under a myth that they have anonymity. You don't. You're one subpoena away from being unmasked online and individuals can do it (eg [1]). When governments do it, they can do it in secret. National Security Letters, pen registers, FISA warrants, etc.

So the idea that "age verification is the first step to a more comprehensive" is flawed in both logical construction (being a fallacy) and that ship has already sailed.

[1]: https://chambers.com/articles/internet-harassment-lawyer

[xg15]

But in this case, the slipping just happened. This thread is about how an app that will be required for using a vast fraction of all websites will require hardware attestation and likely only run on closed, non-rooted mobile OSes. That's not a hypothetical scenario, it's literally what this thread is about.

[protocolture]

>So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.

How has it failed? Whats the measure of a successful freedom vs an unsuccessful one.

>The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.

No its the positive case for action that remains to be justified.

[catlikesshrimp]

>> "We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction)" --- I will need a source, because "arguably" is a very broad umbrella.

"Arguably" heroin addiction is the most harmful addiction because heroin is the most addictive substance, clouds judgement and drives the addict to all manners of sociopathic behaviour (not only theft or prostitition)

[jmyeet]

One big difference is that heroin is mostly illegal or, if not outright illegal, decriminalized for personal use. Gambling is legal in most places, can be advertised quite freely and restrictions can be easily circumvented with crypto. Crypto casinos have little to no age verification and typically operate extrajudicially (from the victim). Gambling addiction has a high outcome of suicide and tends to leave financial ruin affecting not just that person but their entire family.

Heroin addiction was largely created by the criminialization of cannabis (the first so-called War on Drugs under Nixon) as a tool to persecute black people and war protesters and the overprescription of opioids (eg the Sacklers/Purdue).

[jimbob45]

Fentanyl, no?