Awesome. Now you have a system where every blog entry, every Facebook post needs a lawyer consultation.

Around 20 years ago, Germany actually made a law that would have enforced such a system. I still have a chart in my blog that explained it, https://www.onli-blogging.de/1026/JMStV-kurz-erklaert.html. Content for people over 16 would have to be marked accordingly or be put offline before 22:00, plus, if your site has a commercial character - which according to german courts is every single one in existence - you would need to hire a someone responsible for protecting teenagers and children (Jugenschutzbeauftragten).

Result: It was seen as a big censor machine and I saw many sites and blogs shut down. You maybe can make that law partly responsible for how far behind german internet enterprises still are. Only a particular kind of bureaucrat wants to make business in an environment that makes laws such as this.

Later the law wasn't actually followed. Only state media still has a system that blocks films for adults (=basically every action movie) from being accessed without age verification if not past 22:00.

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AnthonyMouse 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Now you have a system where every blog entry, every Facebook post needs a lawyer consultation.

You have that with any form of any of these things. They're almost certainly going to be set up so that you get in trouble for claiming that adult content isn't but not for having non-adult content behind the adult content tag.

Then you would be able to avoid legal questions by labeling your whole site as adult content, with the obvious drawback that then your whole site is labeled as adult content even though most of it isn't.

But using ID requirements instead doesn't get you out of that. You'd still need to either identify which content requires someone to provide an ID before they can view it, or ID everyone.

That's an argument for not doing any of these things, but not an argument for having ID requirements instead of content tags.

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onli 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Funnily enough, marking content that's harmless as only for adults was also punishable, though that might have been in context of a different law. That would be censorship, blocking people under 18 from accessing legal content, was the reasoning. Welcome to German bureaucracy.

But you are right. It's an argument that the "just mark content accordingly" is also not a better solution, not that ID requirements are in any way better. The only solution is not to enable this censorship infrastructure, because no matter which way it's done, it will always function as one.

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AnthonyMouse 17 hours ago | parent [-]

> Funnily enough, marking content that's harmless as only for adults was also punishable, though that might have been in context of a different law. That would be censorship, blocking people under 18 from accessing legal content, was the reasoning. Welcome to German bureaucracy.

That's how you get the thing where instead of using different equipment to process the food with and without sesame seeds, they just put sesame seeds in everything on purpose so they can accurately label them as containing sesame seeds.

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LinXitoW 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

An internet where every wikipedia article has like a picture of boobs as fine print would be very funny.

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gzread 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I understand they can't say "contains sesame seeds" if it doesn't, but why can't they say "processed on equipment that also processes sesame seeds" like some packages do?

	▲	AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Some jurisdictions tried to ban them from saying maybe which is when they started putting them in on purpose so they could say definitely.

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like_any_other 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> plus, if your site has a commercial character - which according to german courts is every single one in existence - you would need to hire a someone responsible for protecting teenagers and children (Jugenschutzbeauftragten).

That is pretty much what the UK Online Safety Act requires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023

Many small forums had to simply shut down, as was widely reported on HN at the time.

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close04 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Awesome. Now you have a system where every blog entry, every Facebook post needs a lawyer consultation.

The alternative is that "just to be safe" you'll mark your entire site as needing age (identity, stool sample, whatever) verification. A single piece of sensitive content sets the requirements for the entire site.