There are any number of alternatives, I favor a walled off whitelisted subset of the internet that requires age verification and then we can let kids on that and otherwise ban them from the general internet and also ban internet enabled devices in general. However, this costs and undoubtably wouldn't be perfect as there are people out there who want to chat up your kids, look at how much work a roblox style site needs to do against internet users who probably shouldn't be chatting up kids.

For those precocious kids who parents decide should be the exception because they are "good with computers" well I'm thinking some sort of waiver would be required that held the parents responsible then maybe let the kid hack on the internet but this is an unpopular view, the unpopular part being the "parents being responsible for their kids" bit.

But in general I think its a tough time to be legislating this stuff because "reasonable perspectives" are not what we are voting into office right now lol

Educational content was already a thing well before the internet got everywhere.

When I was in primary school, one of the things teachers had us do was debate the pros- and cons- of television. The pro side included educational content.

First Windows PC at any of my schools had Encarta.

Wikipedia can be downloaded in entirety and read offline, though it is so broad it may need a degree of filtering to become age-appropriate even for 16 year olds.

I have a feeling that, currently, the cons outweigh the pros. Maybe if the digital landscape changes in the future, then we can reconsider those limitations. So far, the mobile Internet - the apps mainly - is a hostile environment for a young human, and I'd say they are pretty dangerous to the adults too.

Which sounds like a government mandated child harm measure to me.

That is extremely upsetting.

Not having an internet censorship law never stopped a country from making rainbow flags illegal.