Having worked with children from 10 all the way up to 18 in a residential setting, I couldn’t agree more.

In a way they are like addicts: you love them and want the best for them but you absolutely have to be on your guard for egregious breaches of trust cropping up without warning. Children / teenagers / young adults can be driven by curiosity, peers, and lack of judgment into all kinds of dreadful behavior, and it can come from the least likely ones just as much as the obviously naughty ones.

The best we can do is to warn them in advance, accept that mistakes will be made anyway, and support them in learning from their mistakes. Keep at it for even a short while and you too can experience the shock of how your most charming, academically brilliant, upstanding star pupil is found throwing up a bottle of vodka she just drank!

With parenting it’s not a case where you have 100% airtight control over everything with no possible leaks. It’s a spectrum where you impose expectations combined with some controls.

The parents I’ve seen who give up and make no efforts because they think it’s impossible to perfect control everything don’t have great outcomes. This applies to everything from internet to drinking alcohol and more.

There is a fairly big gap between chained in the closet and completely free access to the internet. There is also a lot difference between catching a glimpse of some porn and spending hours in their bedroom exploring the darkest corners of the internet.

I don't have them chained up, but I'm also not concerned they are become radicalized, or damaging themselves watching snuff films and goatse.

> It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available.

The obvious next step is to ban VPNs too or to block connections to their servers.

>It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available.

What's stopping VPN providers from being forced to censor the internet?

I think buy the time your kids can order, pay for, and configure a VPN they are old enough to look at boobies on the internet.

You can legally order pipe tobacco and cigars on the internet in the US without showing ID. When I was a kid you could do it with wine too, and I doubt that's changed. I don't find it to be a problem.

I think smoking is a little different for a few reasons.

It's physically addictive with harsh withdrawal symptoms that makes it difficult to quit; and it has significant healthcare costs for the wider community when smokers eventually get sick and die prematurely.

Nobody is going to get addicted and die prematurely from reading 4chan. Cleaning what you consider a cesspool is not the job of the government. These laws are about kids stumbling into the cesspool before they are ready.

Parents can choose to just not give their kids phones till they are 12 or 13 (highschool). Before that, internet access is on locked down devices in the family room with somebody else around.

Personally I think once your kids are about 13-14 you have probably had your chance to pass on your morals, they need to be mentally prepared to encounter bad stuff on the internet and deal with it.

This is not reddit. I do not understand how such low hanging opinions are on this. There have been publications and tons of enactments from both govs, research labs, companies just sucking out every social media.

It's not like we are not warning you, you have netflix, amazon, google, whatever you want - somehow pirating an American movie is an offense in Europe - but abiding by the same logic is not acceptable - same goes for Assange and Snowden - why the did we abide with American shenanigans if that's just one sided ?

And are you getting ready for the turn-over ? Because all it takes is some mad politicians - alternatives - and I'm not sure the status quo is going to last while AI is booming - more than that - people are increasingly hostile to US and it seems it's going to continue this way if the toddler attitude is kept over.

Setting aside whether it’s true, that’s not a thought crime by any definition.

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Let me put this very simply to you: if I go to a country where the age of consent is 14 and start a business streaming child porn to America, I should be stopped from doing that. This is the same principle with a lesser offence.

I bloody wish I could! Sadly, these things aren't up to me, and the companies involved would probably pay more bribes to your gangster president to get him to sanction our economy if we tried.

Closer to the point: having Uber in a place with a licensed taxi trade is basically the same thing as removing licensing and then granting a monopoly on one business to operate taxis.

So you two are on completely separate frames of thought. One party sees it as a matter of choice, the other sees it as removing choice because one party has a monopoly on avoiding the regulations.

The issue here is IMO more so that the taxi driver should be able to operate a taxi business without a license without having to go through Uber. Ultimately what is happening in a lot of places is the guys with medallions will basically use agents of the state to violently enforce their racket (which Uber breaks up, but then monopolizes), or alternatively in some places in Latin America the entrenched taxi drivers will simply shoot to kill their competitors that don't have cartel sanctioned 'medallions.'

I personally think that FB, Uber, RBNB, Oracle, Google, Amazon, and literally every american SASS should be completely forbidden from Europe. Period no discussion at all. Given the state of current America, given the reactions even on this very post that do not see how Cambridge Analytics has damaged the entire world - yes, I think it would be safe to put a good 10 year ban on every US web tech. It would fasten up Europe and leave out the important decision to someone who can actually make a difference instead of being washed out by some reddit / twitter with fake russian bots. Let the economics just move away and make the decisions for people who are in a state of hypnosis instead of playing with mass control and then calling it "freedom".

Keep your american movies and social networks please. Btw why is TikTok banned in US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

Do some research on why these services are so attractive before you give your opinion on it being a good thing. What these companies are doing should be illegal under US law as well, but they have paid your president to make that issue go away.

Corporations have skin in a game - namely to keep their power, prevent competition from arising, make sure the workers are squeezed with less options so that they demand less salaries.

Capitalism works when there is a competition between companies. Corporations are everything but that.

It's quite ironic that they would have an easier time enforcing that if they were still part of the EU and could have been the deciding factor towards more regulation faster.

The EU is big and rich enough to force Big Tech into submission under threat of loosing the market.

Significantly less than 10%.