Let us be brutally honest: UK did not land where it is now because it is in a weak autocrat worshiping phase. It is in FULL-NANNY mode.

Partisanship being the highest civic value in the US guarantees that we will not break out of that phase but will instead usher it in fully with two mildly different flavors. Coke and Pepsi autocracy with each insisting the other tastes like sewage and their own is ambrosia.

Bluesky has already decided to block Mississippi rather than comply with their age verification requirements.

> And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills

I mean, this is why state and government came into being, so nothing strange with such expectation.

This is a silly take. As soon as an authoritarian government takes power they just strip away the protections put in place to prevent abuse. The answer to preventing the "wrong" government from taking power is to have a strong "right" government.

You're on hacker-news, so this is simple to explain;

Create a new flag in the http header that indicates under-age, and put heavy restrictions (and fines) on what content is allowed to be served as a response. Get this through to google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and apple as a device-wide parent-control feature. Universally enforced and legally backed parent control.

1. Simple to enforce

2. No major security issues

3. No risk of abuse as a surveillance or control mechanism.

4. No issue of "did not know user wasn't child" loophole if anyone is found in violation. If a child is still found on a adult website; it is entirely blamable on parent not running the parent control feature, or the website not respecting the flag.

This type of solution is proposed by the Russian state using special sim-cards for children under 14. Odd how the UK is the extreme one all of a sudden.

Instead we get;

1. Difficult to enforce effectively and easy to circumvent with rudimentary methods for those it actually affects.

2. Security nightmare to do correctly. (recent tea leak)

3. Easy excuse to ban any content the government disapproves of. (wikipedia is now a adult site)

4. A normalization to hand out personal ID and photos to random websites.

5. A perfect excuse for authoritarian governments to implement something similar since "free and democratic nation did the same".

This is not about children. It is never about children. Banning encryption, collect all personal digital communication for review, and personally identify all people online. These three things are non-negotiable, regardless of motive. "protect the children" is easy to say, easy to make everyone agree with, easy to straw-man opponents into monsters. But whenever its used, we better make darn sure that's the real motive.

I would gladly back the first solution above. We need to protect children better, but this law is not about that.

No it does not.

It's creating the infrastructure for mass surveillance (this is mass surveillance) and shifting the Overton window.

You're fine with this, what's the next target. They're already onto the subject of VPN's.

Do you like the taste of bacon?

Wikipedia is on the list of sites that the government is trying to force age verification on[1].

This isn't about people being scared they're going to be outed for watching porn. Even if the government honestly have no intentions to further restrict people's access to information, this is a genuine step towards authoritarian censorship.

I'm (somewhat hypocritically) not against purging 4chan & other sites that ferment dangerous right wing hatred from the internet, I am against anything that tries to limit or restrict access to legal content

1 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjr11qqvvwlo

If you're worried about kids being abused in the UK you have way bigger issues to deal with than porn on the web man.

In fact screwing around with the web this way is likely to make those other issues much harder to solve.

This is beyond vague. What do you even mean by morality? And how is it better for non-western entity to allegedly control the narrative, except also using it for its own benefit, which would be immoral by definition?

'The West also does bad stuff' is not the same thing as 'China and the west are the same' or 'Russia and the west are the same'. That's a false equivalency. The west has a long tradition of respecting individual rights. You aren't going to get disappeared like you absolutely will in those places. Say what you will about the failings of the west, but there's a clear moral high ground there, even if that height is an inch tall.

That's like saying half the population is dumber than the average

Remember, as long as you can convince people that IQ is a valid metric, they’ll believe anything you say.