It was less commercial then. It was not as much "occupied" by intermediaries who think the internet exists for their commercial gain and anyone who uses it owes them something

I think it is amusing how these commercial third party intermediaries today are trying to frame things like "chat control" and "age restrictions" as attacks on internet users' rights rather than attacks on their intermediation "business model"

Generally, there is no age restriction on subscribing to internet service. However third party intermediaries that have now occupied seemingly every corner of the web, so-called "tech" companies, want everyone to believe that intermediaries _are_ the internet (as opposed to middlemen who seek to surveil as many internet subscribers as they can)

I am glad I grew up before the internet so that I understand and appreciate the only service that matters is _internet service_. People today take internet service for granted perhaps but I can remember when it was a new frontier

With internet service, there were so many possibilities. Today, so-called "tech" companies portray internet service as a given, apparently useless on its own,^1 whilst they advertise themselves as offering "services" (usually for free, a Trojan Horse for commercial surveillance). They utilise bandwidth paid for by the internet subscriber to transfer encrypted surveillance data to themselves

1. For example, when Mozilla claims something like without an online advertising "ecosystem" the internet would be worthless. The greed and self-entitlement behind this framing is both absurd and hilarious

Same, so much so!

My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!

(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)

And when I was a kid some of my peers were watching Al Queda execution videos.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.

I remember winning a 10-kill LORD game on a local BBS. It took ages of me staying up until midnight to kill all the resurrected players after the daily reset. I had only one real competitor on that server and he gave up after I slew the dragon twice in one week (due to great luck.)

Protecting children is one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc.

This seems like an attempt to leverage something widely regarded as reasonable (stop kids from accessing pornographic content without parental oversight) as the camel's nose through the tent to establish widespread identity tracking on the internet.

The fight for this kind of legislature has been ongoing for many years as part of a broader program that seeks to shape the kinds of information that can be stored, consumed, and propagated on the Internet. Age verification is only one branch of the fight, but an important one to the many who support government control: it is an inroad that allows governments to say they have a stake in who sees what.

It has nothing to do with age gating, and everything to do with tracking. While there may be some funding going on behind the scenes, governments love tracking on its own merits.

I think it's possible that there are secretive efforts to destroy permissionless access to the internet, but my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.

A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in sync with each other, not because they're intentionally colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural strategy is to set your rental prices based on that.

Do social movements _always_ have people at the top pulling the strings? Is it _never_ the case that even when you can identify thought leaders, the movement itself is organic and broadly supported?

It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across borders to restrict access and rights.

This strikes me as almost conspiratorial thinking, and it's reflected in the article. At one point they say KOSA is unpopular but.. it isn't? These laws (KOSA, OSA) enjoy broad, bipartisan popularity and politicians are jumping on the bandwagon because they want votes. It really is as simple as that.

There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting with access to their kids.

The Christian right has been pushing for this forever. They finally acquired enough political and cultural purchase to get this measure pushed over the line.

Plot twist: It's Ashton Kutcher.

https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotligh...

What does the movie Scarface have to say about it?

Damaging in different ways. I'm not sure you can say one is worse.

Sure most kids can look at naked people and not be too affected, we all have the same parts. But beyond that, a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and kids are not really mature enough to understand that in real healthy relationships people don't actually have sex like that.

Both porn and social media can be addictive and unhealthy if they become a substitute for interacting with real people. And this also happens with adults not just kids.

Porn is a special subset of social media.

If we had a way to prove age without revealing any other identity that could be used for tracking/profile building. I don't see that being supported by the tech industry though, as they are almost completely reliant on tracking to earn money.

So it is up to me to monitor your child? I don't work in porn or an even remotely related field but I have to implement age verification now because of Texas's law. Someone explain to me how this is protecting any children.

Just because something isn't ideal doesn't mean it's worth making a law about. Running with scissors -- not best practice. Worth trying to legislate? Absolutely not.

Somebody who's 17 choosing to look at porn? Not in America's top 1 million problems.

I think we must think about what the downside of kids maybe being introduced to porn really. Realistically, it is pretty low. Given that, we shouldn't really be giving up anything to try and stop it. I was exposed to porn several ways pre-Internet. Older siblings, news stands, late night cable. If I wanted more, I could get it. It was simply not a problem.

Maybe there is a problem for a tiny number of individuals, OK. A one size fits all approach like this still isn't the solution in these cases, though.

A fraction of the money poured into these mass surveillance systems and proposals would have gone a long way in developing better parental control software.

If startups build parental control it carries the wrong incentives.

Realistically what's needed for proper parental control.

1. Software that parents can install on phones, and computers (which comes as an upside of less lockdown on devices)

2. A way to whitelist websites and applications (particularly for phones).

3. A way to share, reuse and collaborate on whitelists. No enforcement of a central authority.

As a culture we just have to come to accept that parents should be responsible for managing kids’ devices, and provide them with the device-level tools for doing so. If a parent lets a 10 year old hang out in a sketchy alleyway every weekend, we would blame them for the inevitable consequences. Why do we not blame them for failing to monitor what their kids are up to online?

And before someone tries to bore me with anecdotes about how your particular kid evaded whatever restrictions you put in place, I think if kids put in thoughtful effort and planning to evade restrictions then parents are off the hook. Same as if a kid stages an elaborate ruse (one that would fool most parents) to get out of the house and drink with friends. That’s not on you. Parents aren’t prison wardens and we shouldn’t ask for a police state to fill in parenting gaps.

Making the state into the parent will affect us all, not just kids. I (and plenty of others) will fight to the end to preserve the last vestiges of the free, open internet. Overlay networks and even sneakernet if necessary. We’re not going to accept authoritarian control of communications no matter how much politicians want it.

Repurpose the IPv4 "evil bit" as an "is adult" bit.

> I don't know what to do about it

Do something similar to what we do with video: make a government enforced voluntary rating system (that is, you use if you want, if you use and lie, the government hits you) with a standard where sites can tell their ratings to the clients.

Have the parents decide if they will use the rating for anything.

Assuming the reason for these laws is to protect children from pornography, you could ask, what are the specific harms from pornography? You could identify those harms through scientific study (some have been done; it appears the harms are mostly due to a lack of education and understanding about what's going on in porn) and address them (educate children to understand what's going on intellectually/emotionally and how to treat people with respect). But that would require talking to kids about sex, which adults are petrified of. Our culture is puritanical, and uses fear and shame to avoid dealing with things like sex. It then perpetuates this fear and shame onto each generation, and it pervades every product and service we have. So we could try fighting the irrational fear and become less afraid of sex (and pornography would probably change because of it). But good luck doing that in this country.

> I don't know what to do about it

1. No smart phones for the child before the age of NN, me I say 18. A Smart phone makes a great High School Graduation gift.

2. Only internet access from a desktop computer with a hosts file that the child cannot change. That probably means no Microsoft Windows PC. See: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

eazy-peezy