That's how it should be. Make the Internet 18+ by default and sites targeted at younger audiences can add a more detailed rating. Let people configure their devices however they like it.

The whole problem with the regulation we have right now is that it assumes the Internet is for kids, and everything for adults must be hidden. When we really just should declare the whole Internet as 18+ and the sites for kids should be the specially marked exceptions.

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johen8 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I never thought about that and I find it might actually be the right way for a solution... I was just looking into the Google Play Store now: in Brazil apps need to have an age rating, facebook and instagram for example are 16+, but browsers like firefox, chrome, etc are rated for 'all ages', even though you can access the whole internet through them. If we actually did what you said and inverted the logic: restrict everything to 18+ and specifically mark what is allowed to under-18s it would make parental controls much more effective.

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goda90 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Someone would complain that without ID verification kids would be able to sneak onto the regular Internet and therefore we should eliminate privacy on the regular Internet, just like they're doing now.

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kelvinjps10 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So kids shouldn’t have access to sites like Wikipedia? Banning the internet is not the correct solution many kids depend on the internet to have access to education.

The argument could be made for banning social media but the whole internet I don’t think it’s the correct approach

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johnnyanmac 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If Wikipedia can't put in the effort with those millions in donations to get an age rating? I guess not. We know Youtube will.

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mrguyorama 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If we had a "Safe for everyone" public internet and a locked down "Prove you are an adult" internet beside it, nothing prevents wikipedia from being on the Safe for Everyone internet.

Also, Encarta was a thing. Expensive though.

Some states would legislate wikipedia onto the "Adults only" web though because they don't like what it says about things like abortion and trans people.

A lot of ecommerce companies would probably be happy with a locked down adults only internet, because it would kick bot protection up a level, and would require a fairly robust solution to it.

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adiabatichottub 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well... Wikipedia has content that some would consider offensive or unsuitable for children. I'm not in favor of limiting any access to Wikipedia, but I'd consider it a certainty that the day would come when Wikipedia had to decide whether to implement age restrictions or try to police content. I believe that event would change it's governance and social structure in a negative way and significantly degrade it as a public resource.

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johnnyanmac 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Likewise, some old history documentaries have gore or nudity. I think our current content ratings systems are not as obtuse as "nipple? R rating".

>I believe that event would change it's governance and social structure in a negative way and significantly degrade it as a public resource.

This can and has already been doing even without age verification. We're way beyond government survellaince in many countries.

	▲	mrguyorama 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In the US, our content rating systems are absolutely as obtuse as "Nipple? R" You traditionally can say one "Fuck" in a PG-13 movie, which will be about brutally displayed murder and violence and how awesome vigilante justice is. But if you have even a couple frames of a single (female, but like, that's its own insane can of worms) nipple, you cannot get lower than an R rating. This is all well publicized, despite there not being public standards for the process, and the specific wording of the PG-13 advisory is "Some content may be unsuitable for children under 13", which is weird language to describe what actually happens in practice. This is because the rating system is a weird club of "Parents of children in school" in los angeles. It's about as corruptible and sketchy as a system can get. The ESRB is similar. Shooting lots of people? Well there's no blood so that can be for everyone. Oh, now you added some red particle effects? Sorry, now it's Mature. GTA 3 had an M rating, but a person found that if you hacked the game and changed the code you could play a sex minigame. That caused the game to have an Adults Only rating. Even though it's not something you could do, see, or activate in game at all. And also the game already had functionality to have sex with a hooker and then murder them to get your money back. It exists because the dumbest parents went apeshit over yet another fake controversy (Oh my god, D&D has demons!!!. OH MY GOD. This game about saving teenage girls from creatures in a crazy amount of costume who harm them with a 2 foot long grabby arm because the developers wanted to avoid unfortunate implications is JUST TOO SEXY FOR LITTLE TIMMY and we need to make congress bitch and moan about it for an entire week and ban anything that could ever be entertainment) They are purposely arbitrary because their purpose is to make the crazy people who write letters to the FTC to arrest someone for daring to have a low cut shirt go the hell away. Those people have absurd and arbitrary triggers.

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masfuerte 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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