Like most I've been listening to this same old argument for nearly 30 years. Old enough now to know it doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to even be 50% effective to mark a substantial improvement, a significant chunk of young people won't even need a technical restriction beyond being told the behaviour is against the law because it's bad for them.

But keep goading with "it's technically impossible" and watch what's left of the Internet turn into a government licensing fest, because it is entirely technically possible. Imagine how much cleaner and shiny the nation's pipes would be if we simply throttled any ciphertext flow that couldn't be matched to an Ofcom license holder. They'd never do that. No country in the world has done that, right?

The ‘technically impossible’ arguments always frustrate me. I used to buy into them to - but over time I’ve come to realise that the people making these arguments are not speaking the same language as lawmakers - or most of the rest of society.

It’s ‘technically impossible’ to stop convenience stores selling alcohol or pornography to minors, or to make people to adhere to contracts. Non-engineers don’t care what’s technically possible, they care what’s legally possible, or societally possible.

It’s the same thing when techies try to decipher what _exactly_ a law does and look for loopholes, when to the rest of society the standard is ‘whatever a reasonable person thinks it does’.

You need to make the argument about why the proposed thing is bad for society for it to be taken seriously.

I don't care if it's trivial to implement and impossible to bypass: it's an effort to eliminate anonymous Internet browsing/commenting because everyone over 16 has to submit ID as well. Its the end of free speech on the part of the Internet the UK controls.

At what cost though? Everyone will now need to submit real ID to access social media. Smaller social media sites will probably just shutdown since it’s unlikely they can afford the whole verification process.

Kids (or more specially teens) will just find a site that doesn't require the verification. There will be some and you better hope it's not one run by intelligence agency in unfriendly country.

It would be way better to just reduce the harms in general by e.g. regulating algorithms. Those are things that you can do when people are using platform that you still have some control over.

If anything it’s makes the discussion from parents to the kids so much easier. Why can’t I use it? Because it’s illegal. When will this happen in the US? We need it yesterday.

> it doesn't have to even be 50% effective to mark a substantial improvement

It is not even 10% effective, and rightly so. It’s so absurdly easy to work around that the whole thing is silly. If the kids can’t be on Instagram they’ll find an equally welcoming place like Roblox to hang out.

You aren’t going to stop kids from being kids, and you probably shouldn’t try.

Note how we’re trusting all these US companies with their safety because any of these companies in the EU would immediately be regulated out of existence?