Your hypothetical 14-year-old needs to first be able to bypass the parental controls that come with every modern OS. You keep ignoring that.

(Also, like, did you ever go to college? Live in a dorm or apartment with underage students? It was super common for of-age people to buy and distribute booze to substantially underage students. Everyone knew it was happening all the damn time.)

> they are obviously not liable if i buy something legitimately, go home, and feed it to my kid. in that case, i am liable...

And if you changed up the rules to make them liable, you'd see serious attempts at controlling distribution.

What has been the state of the art in parental controls for quite some time is like the current regulatory regime for booze and tobacco. The single thing that needs to change to make it exactly the same would be to make it substantially illegal for US-based publishers to not tag the porn/violence/etc that they publish with age-restriction tags. [0]

What's being proposed and is currently implemented by several big-name sites is even more invasive.

> we are okay with how smokes and alcohol works right now.

I'm not. Either booze and tobacco need to be made into Schedule I substances, or their regulation needs to become much more lax. But I recognize that my opinion on the topic is considered to be somewhat out-of-the-ordinary.

[0] This might already be the law of the land right now. I haven't bothered to check.

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john_strinlai 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Your hypothetical 14-year-old needs to first be able to bypass the parental controls that come with every modern OS. You keep ignoring that.

because they dont matter. parental controls exist today but have been deemed ineffective for the age verification conversation, for whatever stupid reason. so we are stuck trying to figure something else out. do i wish we could just use the existing basic parental controls instead of whatever the hell we are going to end up with? obviously!

the easiest "something else" is to piggy-back on existing age-restriction regulations (i.e. smokes, alcohol, gambling) because they have broad (obviously not ubiquitous, but broad) support. we have decades of experience with them.

and, to that end, you create a little token and you show your id to the store clerk to buy it. the "protect the children" people are satisfied (its the same process everything else age-restricted!), and i dont need to send my id to a peter thiel company. it preserves privacy, it re-uses existing laws, it re-uses existing infrastructure, etc.

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simoncion 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> ...but have been deemed ineffective for the age verification conversation, for whatever stupid reason.

Consider that such arguments (just like the arguments of Prohibitionists that resulted in the rise to power of Organized Crime) are made in a varied combination of ignorance and bad faith, and that we should loudly reject them in the strongest possible terms.

To be clear, I'm asserting that the claim that preexisting parental controls are insufficient is an argument made in ignorance and bad faith, not your assertion that the argument is being made.

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john_strinlai 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>Consider that such arguments [...] we should loudly reject them in the strongest possible terms.

me and you can yell into the void all we want. and i will continue to do so!

but, age verification is already here. so while i continue to yell about how stupid it is, i am also going to propose options that i feel like are less bad than what is being actively rolled out right now.

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simoncion 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> ...i am also going to propose options that i feel like are less bad than what is being actively rolled out right now.

As I mentioned, what you propose is exactly as useful and protective as what we have now. What we have now has been roundly rejected by the authoritarians pushing this expansion of power and influence. Your time and energy are better spent resisting the expansion, rather than suggesting alternatives that those authoritarians will never accept (and tacitly accepting their premise in the process).

	▲	john_strinlai 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>As I mentioned, what you propose is exactly as useful and protective as what we have now. i disagree, for reasons i have already said and for other reasons i havent yet. but it is clear that we wont end up agreeing, so no need for us to keep going.

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SoftTalker 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A 21-year-old in a dorm buying booze for a 19 year old dorm-mate is a bit different from doing the same for a 14 year old.

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simoncion 4 hours ago | parent [-]

What about a 17 year old? 16? Many folks who go to college are younger than people seem to realize... and teenagers of all ages often like to party.

	▲	SoftTalker 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's very rare to run into anyone under 18 living in a college dorm. There are a few 17 year olds, even fewer younger than that. Sure there are high schoolers taking classes, but as full-time residential students? Not many.