This might have the benefit of reversing the trend where everything on the internet was rolled in to social media. If social media is age restricted, news, announcements, etc will have to break out to dedicated websites if they want to be accessible by all ages.

just ban kids from the internet already. if a parent allows the kid to have a full function smartphone and the kids get caught with it then throw the parents in jail and kids in an orphanage. people will catch on.

We may be agreeing, I'm saying there is no battle tested, privacy safe technical method of verifying age online, and this the controls need to be in the physical environment and setting social standards for social media and phone use.

Phones, I mean. Sorry for the confusion there. I’m for holding off on social media.

I’m talking about phones specifically. Agree re: social media.

This all needs to be modulated by the knowledge that some children benefit immensely from being able to hide parts of their lives from their parents, parts that their parents would disagree with greatly.

The clearest example is LGBTQ kids who want to talk to other LGBTQ kids, or enjoy LGBTQ content, without fundamentalist or just homophobic/transphobic parents finding out. Children of fundamentalist or cult members who want an escape from the cult are another common category.

I do not disagree with any of this, I was hoping it was implied by my original comment that this would be necessary.

A single google search will tell you pretty unanimously that discord isn’t for kids, is rated 13+ and has risks of talking to strangers.

The corporations in this case are fighting against this. This is about your government and its desire to squash opinions they don't like. They are already going so far as to jail people for posting opinions they don't like. This has absolutely nothing to do with children, children are just the excuse.

The point is that you won't be able to just install a Linux distro of your choice in this world - your computer will only run approved OSs that have gone through some kind of certification process to make sure they enforce age-verification content. If, say, the Debian foundation doesn't want to add these mandatory controls because they feel it goes against the spirit of Debian (not to mention the huge issues with the GPL), then your new computer just won't be able to run Debian anymore. And something like Kali would be right out, of course, since anonymity is not compatible with age verification.

Maybe you don't have kids of your own. Once you have 2 or 3, it is quite challenging to manage everything, especially over time.

I remember how my sister and I set up Google Family and fully locked down my niece her phone with app restrictions, screen time restrictions and a policy of accountability when we need to extend the screen time.

It worked really well up until she got a school managed chromebook for homework with no access controls.

As a father of 3, one thing the wife and I had to learn over the course of the first two is that the modern world holds parents to impossible standards and a "fuck off" attitude is required for much of it.

We've had pediatricians shame us for feeding our kids what they're willing to eat and not magically forcing "a more varied diet" down their throats at every meal, despite them being perfectly healthy by every objective metric. There are laws making it technically illegal for us to leave our kids unsupervised at home for any period of time in any condition, even a few minutes if one of us is running slightly late from work/appointments.

Your not-quite-2-year-old is too tall for a rear-facing car-seat? You're a bad parent, possibly a criminal and putting them at risk by flipping the seat to face forward, a responsible parent spends hundreds of dollars they don't have on several different seats to maybe find one that fits better or have their kid ride uncomfortably and arguably unsafely with their legs hyper-extended up the seatback.

Miss a flu shot because you were busy? Careful you don't come off as an antivaxxer.

And all of this and more on top of changing diapers, doctors' appointments, daycare, preschool, school, family activities and full time jobs?

Yeah, when my kids are old enough to engage with social media I will teach them how to use it responsibly, warn them about the dangers, make myself available to them if they have any problems, enforce putting the phones down at dinner and and keep a loose eye on their usage. Fortunately/unfortunately for them they have a technically sophisticated father who knows how to log web activity on the family router without their knowledge. So if anything goes sideways I'll have some hard information to look at. Most families don't have that level of technical skill.