A penalty unit is an inflation-indexed, revenue-indexed fine.

It's different. You show an ID card to a human if you don't look old enough. They look at it and return it. The ID card doesn't get scanned or tied to all your future recreational drug purchases - you don't have an account or a trail that identifies you.

When uploading ID documents, your account gets tied to your real world identity. That's not a precedent the government should be setting, because private entities having an excuse (the law) to require identification erodes privacy, and because in the future other services could be required to ask for an identification, too. Yes, it's the slippery slope (aka "boiling the frog") argument, but that's how laws that erode privacy evolve - step by step.

Now it's account for social media, then it's porn sites, then it's forums where you might see porn or discussions on suicide, drugs or anything deemed morally hazardous. They might require an ID just to view the site or require the site to not make it public. If (or "when", if we don't oppose such laws) enough countries mandate something like this, most sites will likely require an account for all content, regardless of where the person is located, as otherwise they'll likely have to prove that they've not only geolocated the IP of the visitor, but checked that they weren't using VPNs, Tor or similar services.

As for using zero-knowledge proofs and similar technology to make it less infringing on privacy - I very much doubt the government (any government) to implement this with 100% privacy and security.

Yes, but those are in the physical world. [1] In digital realm, having to verify your ID has way more consequences. My passport has been leaked and I have a “quick cash loan” in my name as a result of that.

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[1]: Tangentially, those are trivially circumvented in many countries. When I was a teenager in St. Petersburg, we’ve used a “duty free delivery service”, which (I suppose) just stocked liquor at the duty free shop on the border with Finland, and then sold it. Not sure how legal was the core premise (probably not), but we used it because their couriers didn’t even pretend they need to check our passports (definitely illegal).

In many countries, alcohol is available in grocery delivery services. Couriers happily leave your order at the doorstep even though they are supposed to check your ID. In many other countries, even buying in-store is possible (e.g. Japan, where in any konbini you can just press a button on screen saying “yes, I’m 21”).

No. What is this revisionist nonsense? Where the hell did you think the meme of "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" came from? Conventional wisdom was alias up, or maintain a well-known handle. Do not use or share personal info. Ever.

I don't have to scan my face, upload my ID and share my biometric data with multiple 3rd parties, who will then lose and leak my private data, every time I drive a car.

This law isn't letting anyone use social media freely until they're suspected of not being an adult, at which point they have to age verify. It requires everyone to identify themselves whenever they want to view, interact, reply or share content on the internet.

>Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy.

You pick one of the worst examples? Prohibition drove a black market for spirits . the 21st amendment repealed it because the government missed out on hundreds of thousands in taxes.

The reason to make the law and repeal it were both awful. The lessons learned were all wrong. It's just awful all around (and I speak as someone that doesn't really drink much).

> The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass.

When decentralized networks win, they often win so big that they become invisible. AOL is dead, the web isn't. Email, the global telephone network, the internet itself, these are all decentralized networks.

The hardest part of doing this for social media is actually discovery. It's easier to show people an "engaging" feed when your algorithm has access to the full firehose to select from. But that doesn't mean doing it in a decentralized way is impossible, and if you pass a law that drives people away from centralized services, the incentive to do it goes up.

The “engaging experience” is the entire problem. The fact that it’s harder to do addiction engineering on a decentralized network is a feature.

Aaannd then the mask came off, proving you were a moralistic authoritarian. I suppose you support cartels destabilizing entire nation-states with billions of criminal funds too

>What social networks are these?

well for one: I find it humorous how this law has an exception for Roblox. That really speaks to how up to date lawmakers are on the situation (or worse: how easy it was for Roblox to pay them off). I don't see how it's a slippery slope when the corruption is before our very eyes.

>Slippery-slope arguments,

Slippery slope arguments exist because the act of governing has the tendency to converge on ratchet effects. It never bloody loosens, do every damn inch has to be treated with maximal resistance.

>What social networks are these?

That's the point, there are always fringe social networks you don't know, and they are probably x10 toxic than reddit comment sections.

In discussions similar to this I often see parents expressing their happiness with a state taking the role of a "bad cop" so that the parents can just wash their hands off telling their children it is state's fault they can no longer use TikTok ("I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board." from OP) instead of having a proper conversation about harms of social media with the children. This is literally a cop out for them from a proper parenting.

From my point of view I'm already paying for their brats with higher taxes, now I will also have to gradually give my documents to random web sites more and more just to reduce the "burden" of parenting on lazy parents...

Firstly, I'm not from the US. Secondly, I don't agree that forcing bunch of random web sites and apps (i.e. not government or banking sites/apps) to demand ids from their users is a "reasonable environment".

> This is not "offloading parenting of your child to the government" it is acknowledging that a certain action can be far easier to take (getting a child off social media) if the government puts in laws to support those actions.

Compromising my privacy in order to allow you to omit having some tough but needed conversations with your child (i.e. _parenting_) regarding harms of social media is not a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Homer Simpson was supposed to be a parody on a bad father, not a role model with his "You're the government's problem now!".

> Are laws against violence a way of off-loading physical protection to the government?

Of course they are! I support government protecting me from violence in some capacity, although I don't support "chat control"-like laws since the cost/benefit doesn't seem to be favorable.

I mean, it does invite the Government to your household, just like marriage (which is a legal contract) invites the Government into your bedroom. I oppose both.

Parents are supposed to be parenting, without the help of the Government. You do not want your kid to spend their time on Facebook or Instagram? Do something about it yourself, as a parent. I understand that tech-illiterate people may be at a disadvantage here, but we are on HN and I am pretty sure we are able to:

Set up a Raspberry Pi (or any other SBC, or even an old x86 box) running Pi-hole with custom blocklists, configure DNS-level filtering with time-based access rules, or implement iptables/nftables rules on your router to enforce schedules. You can use hostapd with separate SSIDs for children with different firewall rules, set up a transparent proxy with squid + SquidGuard for content filtering and time restrictions, or configure your router's DHCP to assign specific DNS servers per MAC address with dnsmasq managing time windows. If you want more granular control, there's pfSense or OPNsense with packages like pfBlockerNG-devel for domain blocking and traffic shaping, or you could write a simple cron job that modifies your firewall rules based on time of day. These are all straightforward solutions that don't require government-mandated age verification systems with their inevitable privacy nightmares and implementation overreach.

The technical capability exists; the question is whether parents are willing to invest a few hours to implement it rather than demanding legislation to do their job for them.

This got rejected in the end, btw.