The point is to undermine data protection; this debate is useless. It's a question about power and control, not a technical one. The people lobbying for this don't care about children, and neither are they getting big support from a constituency clamoring for this. This is an intelligence initiative, and a donor initiative from people who are in a position to control the platform (all computing and communications) after it is locked down.

It's not even worth talking about online. There's too much inorganic support for the objectives of nation-states and the corporations that own them.

Legislation has been advanced in Colorado demanding that all OSes verify the user's age. It will fail, but it will be repeated 100 times, in different places, smuggled attached to different legislation, the process and PR strategies refined and experimented with, versions of it passed in Australia, South Korea, maybe the UK and Europe, and eventually passed here. That means that "general purpose" computing will be eventually be lost to locked bootloaders.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/colorado-lawmakers-push-for-age-v...

[edit: I'm an idiot, they already passed it in California https://www.hunton.com/privacy-and-cybersecurity-law-blog/ca...]

And it will be an entirely engineered and conscious process by people who have names. And we will babble about it endlessly online, pretending that we have some control over it, pretending that this is a technical discussion or a moral discussion, on platforms that they control, that they allow us to babble on as an escape valve. Then, one day the switch will flip, and advocacy of open bootloaders, or trading in computers that can install unattested OSes, will be treated as organized crime.

All I can beg you to do is imagine how ashamed you'll be in the future when you're lying about having supported this now, or complaining that you shouldn't have "trusted them to do it the right way." Don't let dumb fairytales about Russians, Chinese, Cambridge Analytics and pedophile pornography epidemics have you fighting for your own domination. Maybe you'll be the piece of straw that slows things down just enough that current Western oligarchies collapse before they can finish. Maybe we'll get lucky.

Polls and ballots show that none of this stuff has majority organic support. But polls can be manipulated, and good polls have to be publicized for people to know they're not alone, and not afraid they're misunderstanding something. If both candidates on the ballot are subverted, the question never ends up on the ballot.

The article itself says nothing that hasn't been said before, and stays firmly under the premise that access to content online by under-18s is suddenly one of the most critical problems of our age, rather than a sad annoyance. What is gained by having this dumb discussion again?