It’s a good idea for grocery stores to not sell children alchohol. It’s a bad idea for grocery stores to not sell alcohol to ANYONE, adults included, because children might buy it by faking their IDs. That’s the difference here.

Alcohol is a perfect example as well, because I personally drink it only occasionally but would very much rather see it completely banned, as I think it would solve a lot of problems with society. In reality it likely wouldn’t, but the gut feeling is there. If I were to blindly follow my instinct and not know history, I would call for a total ban on it to protect the children.

The same is happening here, but at a much more dangerous level.

Plenty of friction exists. Access to devices being banned at schools, ISP parental controls, selective DNS blocking, Google/Apple child accounts. For the most part it's just carelessness. Before the Internet children that were persistent enough and that had apathetic parents still found a way (perhaps less volumes and less extreme though)

> it's also a good idea that it's illegal for my local grocery store to sell them any

As someone who has been a kid, I would call such restrictions "performative" rather than a "good idea".

Hard disagree. I would love for moderation to be opt-out, for example. I might not agree with moderator actions, so I would very much prefer to see an unfiltered HN instead of having someone else dictate what I am allowed to see or not. The same applies to other websites, especially Reddit.

Alas, I have no choice in the matter, but I would very much prefer I did.

While I understand some content HAS to be regulated (CSAM) doesn’t mean everything has to be, because inevitably that will devolve into the government policing wrongthink.

>I'll advocate for freedom of speech but I don't want to have to listen to everything.

Nobody is preventing you from filtering out at the client side whatever it is that you don't want to hear.

We had this in Internet Explorer

People under age can obtain fake IDs, all over the world. This is illegal, but it still happens. At some point, it is ultimatey a parents responsibility to prevent their children from doing so by acting as a parent to their child and preventing them from engaging in destructive behavior. This is established law, even, in many countries, where a parent can be held accountable for the criminal actions of their children for failing to prevent it.

And frankly, I don't give enough of a shit about other peoples' kids to believe that internet usage should require identification like is being pushed by major governments. I want good things for these kids, I want them to grow up in a good society and a good world, and I dont want harm to come to them. But I recognize that a "good society" and a "good world" and one that minimizes harm to people is one where information is available without restrictions and without censorship and without the risk of a government that might decide it wants to commit genocide against you in the not-so-distant future using your search history to persecute you. Pardon my riffing off Flowbots' Handlebars there, but this really is the world that people live in today; powerful world-stage governments want to restrict information about topics they do not like, and are persecuting people who posess this information; the next steps are very, very well documented.

Creating the monster we are watching grow is not worth anything anyone could ever promise you.

Honest question - when were you "coming up" and are you sure it didn't do anyone any harm then?

I'm mid-late 40s and the internet was not really there when I was growing up. Someone ten years younger than me would have much more porn available to them, easily, in the home during their formative years. But even since then it's likely become more pervasive and present by an order of magnitude, and people have connected devices with them all the time in a way they wouldn't have back then.

We also have lots of academics saying that porn is changing attitudes to sex and what is acceptable behaviour (the rise of choking, for instance).

So it seems reasonable to ask the question, not whether today's kids are vulnerable to harms we weren't vulnerable to, but have things changed significantly in the intervening years?

Note - I'm not defending the clusterfuck that is the OSA. But the world is not always as it was.

> subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.

The thing is, the tech and infra for this is already out there. For example DNS services that offer adult-website filtering. The cost to implement this at the ISP level really wouldn't cost much (at at technological level).

Were those videos? No. Did they depict sex acts? No. It's qualitatively different. I was raised in an extremely liberal household full of Playboy mags, looking at photos of naked women since I was 5 years old. The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe, and probably impossible to find outside an underground video group for sadists. I have no real problem with kids looking at nudes. That is not this. Porn has pushed itself into dementia chasing shock value. Seeing a blowjob photo was something a child could encounter in the early 90s, maybe a very sophisticated child with very early access to all the dark shit on the early internet. If you spent hours figuring out how to find one. But maybe you'd see one or two. Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem. It is a real problem, and it doesn't matter whether it's shown to a child on a website or on a home VCR, it's enormously corrupting and there absolutely is a societal harm in allowing it to happen. The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.