Growing up I remember the trope about showing papers to do anything in the USSR. It was in direct contrast to the display of freedom in America.

Not everyone has a credit card. Some people cannot obtain a credit card. People under the age of 18 can also have a credit card. I do not trust random sites with my credit card.

So these are objections in practice, not principle. Important but consider:

- Most states give free IDs

- Your safety concern is addressed by other commenters here (see the verifying age anonymously)

How about this: I don't want every little thing I do on the internet tracked and tied to my real identity?

Is the CCP conducting a psyops on HN right now or something? Since when were we all for every tiny interaction you have on the internet requiring you to look in the scanner and say "My name is X and I love my government and McDonalds"?

HN seems to have become a lot more mainstream, in comparison to the old cyberlibertarian "privacy and piracy" days.

Where's the new hangout?

Gut check was that the "Most states give free IDs" statement wouldn't hold up. So I checked real quick.

"At least eight states issue free or discounted IDs to low-income or homeless residents and at least 10 states waive ID fees for seniors."

That's far from most states, and even then it comes with stipulations.

You changed the argument from credit card to government Id (an even worse idea imo).

You seem to want the law to be that I need to show ID to enter most internet establishments. I will never, ever, ever hold that opinion.

You understand the intenet isn't made up of US states, right?

> If there is a constitutional right to absolutely 100% friction free access to information then what happens to all the barriers the government has erected to access covid, Trump, Russia and other "disinformation" progressive pushed for?

...those barriers go away. They never really existed in the first place in any real way. Like the Great Firewall, they were a polite fiction defining what people are allowed to know, but were trivially circumvented from minute zero.

This is one of the most reliable and desirable features of the internet in the first place.