I generally think that children's access to the internet needs to be more closely monitored. You wouldn't allow your child to walk up to random strangers in the street without you there, why do we allow it online? I have on a few occasions had to protect a child from an adult in an online group.

What concerns me here is how this will be enforced. The only way to implement this is with IDs to check birth dates, and some method to confirm you are the person on the ID. You could imagine this being consolidated into a government ID system to 'protect your data', and to mean you only have to validate once. These accounts will be permanently attached to real people, and I think it will have a chilling effect on free speech. It's all fun and games until the government of the day considers your speech as a threat.

One can see this being expanded too, so that you would need to provide ID to use the internet more generally. ISPs could be told to selectively deliver web pages from DNS based on your ID, which would be most effective on mobile devices and less so on wired networks. My ISP already blocks websites.

I think a more fundamental question is whether the nanny state should be telling you how to raise your children, what content they can consume and who they can interact with. Suddenly you find your children consuming content only from a Z-wing bias because the government of the day hates Y-wing politics.

> You wouldn't allow your child to walk up to random strangers in the street without you there

This applies to under 16 year olds though, not little children but adolescents. I would hope that every parent of teenagers allows them to talk to random people on the street.

Back in the 90's we were somewhat supervised when using the internet on the family PC. We were also somewhat supervised while watching the family TV.

This is the most horrifying thing in all of this. People with a prison guard mentality are already thinking how to enforce the rules in an even stricter way. Rules that are violating freedom of information, one of the most basics Western freedoms. Yes, there are no repreciations for the violating them at first, the frog is getting boiled slowly, but give it a few years and people who let their child use social media will be treated as criminals and put in prisons. Everything "for the sake of children."

The benefit of allowing one nerdy kid unrestricted access to the internet is often larger than literally hundreds of people “harmed” by that very same access.

Trying to kill the pipeline for creating the “hacker” mentality that folks here are supposed to have is supreme level bootlicking. I hope you eventually find it disgusting.