You need licenses for a lot of things though, particularly for things where there is substantial harm to be done when done incorrectly. This is just how it goes as things get more popular. Think back to 1903, there was no FAA then, but also no need for one. But it would be super disingenuous to argue now that airspace should be totally unregulated.

I think the problem with this debate in general is that people aren’t recognizing the harm, and are clinging on to old ideas about how the world should work, ideas that just don’t acknowledge the reality of how things change as technology changes, or even just spreads. Rejecting the idea that there are harms, and thus nothing should be done, just ensures you don’t have a seat at the table at all when it comes to the inevitable decision to do the regulation.

He was saying, vendors put that flag in the OS and parents set that flag in the OS and internet services respect that flag from the OS. No website anything, all in the OS. No staying ahead of anything, one and done. This, as noted above, requires that services respect the flag, which they do not universally do today. That requires legislation, something that will be a part of any workable solution.

That's a valid take. The issue I'm wrestling with is the inevitable attempts to point a finger at who is responsible when bad things happen. If you claim it is on the tech companies to know if a child is online, then they will take the safest path for them by forcing ID verification in independent adhoc manners. This is what we are seeing now, and to me this is the worst situation. If you shift the responsibility more to the parents (this child was using a device that didn't send the `PARENT_CONTROL` flag, therefore we assumed they were an adult) it's a completely different conversation. Furthermore, if something happens to a child AND it's obvious from traffic logs that the platform willingly knew a child was being talked to, then that is also a completely different situation than the first.

Leaving it all completely deregulated and/or letting platforms implement it themselves to varying levels of success and personal invasion feels like the worst option to me.

I am not, indeed. However as programmer I was sometimes told to do what the customer wants, even though it is complex or inapt. If this DNS blocking is inapt or misused, it's a political problem so let the citizens deal with it (I know this seems like wishful thinking given the current poor state of politics at least in the EU, but hopefully we will fix that while it's still in our hands).

Besides, I read about what happened with Spain and football, and from my understanding the issue was that they blocked not DNS but IP addresses. And problem domain is also vastly different, a priori: in that case, they faced sites that were actively trying to avoid blocking, while in our case, I doubt pron sites and such will try to do the same, because children are not their target audience.

An alternative could be to create a top level domain (TLD) "for kids" and restrict kid phones to it. Then in your TLD you can admit sites that meet minimum criteria (no pron, no terrorism, content and chat moderation for SNS).