> Why not?

This implies the creation of an infrastructure for the total surveillance of citizens, unlike age verification by physical businesses.

> Physical businesses

Physical businesses nominally aren't selling their items to people across state or country borders.

Of course, we threw that out when we decided people could buy things online. How'd that tax loophole turn out?

For one thing, it's fairly uncommon for children to purchase operating systems. As long as there is one major operating system with age verification, parents (or teachers) who want software restrictions on their children can simply provide that one. The existence of operating systems without age verification does not actually create a problem as long as the parents are at least somewhat aware of what is installed at device level on their child's computer, which is an awful lot easier than policing every single webpage the kid visits.

> Physical businesses have liability if they provide age restricted items to children.

These are often clear cut. They're physical controlled items. Tobacco, alcohol, guns, physical porn, and sometimes things like spray paint.

The internet is not. There are people who believe discussions about human sexuality (ie "how do I know if I'm gay?") should be age restricted. There are people who believe any discussion about the human form should be age restricted. What about discussions of other forms of government? Plenty would prefer their children not be able to learn about communism from anywhere other than the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

The landscape of age restricting information is infinitely more complex than age restricting physical items. This complexity enables certain actors to censor wide swaths of information due to a provider's fear of liability.

This is closer to a law that says "if a store sells an item that is used to damage property whatsoever, they are liable", so now the store owner must fear the full can of soda could be used to break a window.

If you want to avoid all pervasive surveillance, it might be wise to not mandate all pervasive surveillance in the OS by law.

In fact, I suspect adults, and not just children, would also appreciate it if the pervasive surveillance was simply banned, instead of trying to age gate it. Why should bad actors be allowed to prey on adults?

Both are problems, porn sites have also targeted children and any non-enforced age “verification” on these sites is simply plausible deniability that isn’t plausible at all

That is what I meant by age(-rating), you are correct. However, drop country specifics - too complicated. Age brackets are enough: child, preteen, teen, adult. At around 16-17 these should be dropped anyway since at that point people are smart enough to get around these measures anyway and usually have non-parent controlled devices.

>This is a great solution to the stated problem. The issue is that nobody is actually trying to solve the stated problem. This is a terrible solution to the real 'problem' which is the lack of surveillance power and information control.

So on the Sony consoles I created an account for my child and guess what they have implemented some stuff to block children from adult content on some stuff.

So if Big Tech would actually want to prevent laws to be created could make it easy for a parent to setup the account for a child (most children this days have mobile stuff and consoles so they could start with those), we just need the browsers to read the age flag from the OS and put it in a header, then the websites owners can respect that flag.

I know that someone would say that some clever teen would crack their locked down windows/linux to change the flag but this is a super rare case, we should start with the 99% cases, mobile phones and consoles are already locked down so an OS API that tells the browser if this is an child account and a browser header would solve the issue, most porn websites or similar adult sites would have no reason not to respect this header , it would make their job easier then say Steam having to always popup a birth date thing when a game is mature.

Three states now implement this solution that you just called a great solution, and most of HN still hates it. Are they seeing something that you're not? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357294

Seems simple until you try to figure out what's allowed for what age, which surely will differ by country at a minimum.

In the UK parents can give children alcohol below the age of 18. parents get to make the final decision at home so I do not think its really comparable.

I would personally favour allowing parents to buy drinks for children below the current limits (18 without a meal, 16 for wine, beer and cider with a meal).

The alternative to this is empowering parents by regulating SIM cards (child safe cards already exist) and allowing parents to control internet connectivity either through the ISP or at the router - far better than regulating general purpose devices. The devices come with sensible defaults that parents can change.

That steelman still stands on a core assumption that its both the state's responsibility and right to step in and parent on everyone's behalf.

Maybe a majority of people today agree with that, but I know I don't and I never hear that assumption debated directly.

If this had anything to do with reigning in tech giants, it would be done for adults as well, without restricting anyone's rights (well, aside from the people-corporations' of course). The issues are the manipulative algorithmic datafeeds, advertising, and datamining. Age verification does nothing for any of this and only provides the tech giants and governments the means to secure even more control over people.

The tech giants want this. They drafted the bill. They paid tens of millions of dollars to promote it. Think about that for a minute.

The latter is true, but we cannot regulate the vast majority of parents on the basis of the worst.

Exactly. Having lived through it already, I know what it did to me and I would never wish that upon another child. The internet saved me from being a religious, colonial, racist piece of shit like the rest of my family.

I have personally worked with parents trying to prevent their children from using social media and it’s nearly impossible. Kids are almost always more tech savvy than their parents and unlike smoking it’s nearly impossible to tell a child is doing so without watching them 100% of the time.

Who controls your age if you try to buy alcohol.

Who controls your age if you want to see an R-rated movie?

This is simply extending the same level of control to the internet.

More control for parents is a completely different level.