IANAL, but I wish they had put this bullet closer to the top, although I agree the logical flow does have it more appropriately at the bottom.

> Adults in any of these groups who are unwilling to share their identities will find themselves shunted onto a second-class internet alongside the young people who have been denied access to this information.

This is what I wish people would understand. It doesn't just protect kids from dangerous information. It flips the assumption of age on it's head.

You're no longer assumed to be an adult on the internet, you're assumed to be a child. If you want to be treated as an adult, you have to "show" your ID, and this is not a cashier selling beer at the gas station. This will include the least trustworthy data-hoarding internet marketers who don't give a damn about your privacy. They will view your ID verification as data that can be used for marketing campaigns and sold to other people. They will probably be glad if this law passes because of the cover it gives them to invade your privacy even more.

Thinking about this in terms of HN, how does a site like this even exist in this world? How could anyone without the resources to hire a team of ID checkers possibly run a forum? Pretty much everything I enjoy about the internet would be gone.

They'll use an ID service. It'll be like google auth. We'll all be worse off for it

Skimming the bill, nonprofits are not covered platforms, so while HN specifically probably wouldn't be excluded, most similar forums probably would. That said, HN doesn't have features meant to be addictive like infinite scroll, rewards for time spent on the platform, or even notifications, and doesn't have individual specific advertisements, or ads for drugs, gambling, etc. So it likely wouldn't have an issue anyway.

Also:

> Nothing in this title, including a determination described in subsection (b), shall be construed to require—

> (1) the affirmative collection of any personal data with respect to the age of users that a covered platform is not already collecting in the normal course of business; or

> (2) a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality

So it literally says nothing in the title should be construed as suggesting sites need to check ID.

I don't see a logic here. You cannot pay for internet from ISP or get SIM card with data as child, right?

Sure but that assumes that everybody has to pay for their own internet connection, which is not true. If it were, there wouldn't be any children on the internet at all, yet we know that isn't the case. There is no shortage of places to get online these days without having to directly pay an ISP.

If you run a website and you're liable if a child accesses content that the gov says children shouldn't be able to access, do you post it anyway? or do you assume everybody is a child unless they show you some ID?

Or asked a different way, suppose you run a gas station and you sell beer. The law will punish you tremendously if you sell alcohol to a minor. Do you assume everybody is old enough to buy beer since they were able to gain access to a vehicle (which you must be an adult to legally own) and sell to whoever, or do you ask to see people's ID?

If an adult was found to be giving access to pornographic magazines and tapes to their child, and especially someone else's child, and even placing them on the child's desk in their bedroom, I think the police or CPS would want to get involved.

While I understand a computer is just as tool, it does seem weird that we just gloss over the fact that websites just hand porn to children and don't worry about it, but if you did it on the street you would get run out of town at best and arrested at worst.

Full text of the new version of the bill can be found here: https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/21424kosabil...

I am reading though the bill right now and do not have quite the same takeaway that the EFF is promoting. Sec 102 specifically exempts platforms from limiting "any minor from deliberately and independently searching for, or specifically requesting, content". This seems to neuter a lot of the pushback that the bill will prevent youth from searching for sexual health, minority status, LGBTQ+ information.

I think a lot of platforms are upset that they won't be able to push this type of content algorithmically (see the prevalence of "mental-health-tok", "5 signs that you have ADHD" videos) but I am *very* skeptical that this type of content is healthy for anyone. I think it drives a ton of engagement which large platforms don't want to lose.

My main beef with KOSA is that a bunch of the meat of the rules and enforcement (Sec 106 - Sec 109) is completely punted on. Lots of "Not later than 18 months after the enactment of this act" the FTC will "issue guidance" or create rules for various things. It seems like Congress doesn't quite know what they want to regulate, but they want someone (who isn't them) to do so.

Well isn’t that cute. Congress wants an administrative law solution but refuses to codify protections for other administrative law divisions like the EPA.

Well mutilating a child’s genitalia is about as abusive as you can get. Even giving them medication that will delay puberty is a lifetime baggage of hormonal problems. A child cannot goddamn consent.

> A child cannot goddamn consent.

And yet, somehow, children across the United States get the exact same gender-affirming treatments (including but not limited to hormone therapy, cosmetic surgery, and yes, even genital mutilation) without complaint only if the gender being affirmed happens to match some evaluation of their biological sex.

Anyway, setting that glaring contradiction aside, your argument fails in the context of social transition (e.g., being called a nickname), which is the much more common form of adolescent transition and still somehow elicits the same overreaction you have demonstrated.

I'm not sure why you're bringing circumcision into this.

I assumed they were talking about genital reassignment surgery for infants born with ambiguous genitals.

It's the largest scale easy to solve massive human rights violation in The Western World(tm)!

Frankly I am deeply saddened it isn't in every thread on every discussion forum. Eric Clopper gave his Harvard presentation OVER FIVE YEARS AGO!!!

I mean a whole body part (15 in^2) just censored from medical literature and the public's mind for a century or more... how crazy is that?!

Surely you must be more outraged by male circumcision which occurs more frequently by orders of magnitude?

That in Europe it's seen as barbaric and outdated stuff straight from the XIX century if not before.

To a certain extent but it’s not nearly as bad considering you’re not fundamentally messing up hormones.

I've read this article multiple times, but I still don't understand the core legal claim.

What's the case for the First Amendment not allowing KOSA?

What makes KOSA different from constitutional obscenity/indecency laws?

Thanks for helping me understand.

This Techdirt piece from Mike Masnick describes a bit more detail: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/15/senator-blumenthal-prete...

Mike Masnick is funded by Google via his Copia institute, so any time Mike rails against a proposed regulation of Google / YouTube you should probably just dismiss it.

Who said the obscenity/indecency laws are constitutional? I sure as hell don’t think they are. These sorts of laws spit in the face of the First Amendment and deserve to be struck down.

they are there to protect everyone from people like you who want to walk around naked.

> Who said the obscenity/indecency laws are constitutional?

Courts

> These sorts of laws spit in the face of the First Amendment

FWIW, the same people who created and passed the First Amendment also created and passed obscenity laws.

Just in case you don't see what the actual play is:

1. Pass an act that requires verification for sexual content not appropriate for kids.

2. Define everything relating to the LGBT as sexual content.

3. Define ideas they don't like as too dangerous to expose to children.

4. Argue that this isn't an ban because the content is technically accessible.

Like they're not even bothering to hide it anymore.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/sena...

https://www.blackburn.senate.gov/2021/7/why-is-critical-race...

Unless there's some part of the amendment I'm missing they haven't really done anything to mitigate this despite the blogspam that says otherwise. Removing the ability of states to decide what isn't age appropriate isn't nothing but it's not like leaving it to the federal government is doing meaningfully better. With the state control one can at least move to a blue state, putting it in the hands of the FTC means it's basically at the whim of $current_president.

> 2. Define everything relating to the LGBT as sexual content.

Just to be crystal-clear, this particular step is not so much a prediction as it is a recollection. While the intensity has been tapering off for decades at an agonizingly slow rate, the entire history of Internet content filtering is deeply intertwined with the ideological bugbears of the American religious right. Even Cloudflare in A.D. 2020 botched the "1.1.1.1 for Families" launch by accidentally pulling the homophobic flavor of its upstream vendor's "adult content" database [1]. Unless you've been paying close attention for the past ~30 years, the rot runs deeper than you can imagine.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-mistake-that-caused-1-1-1-3-...

Not even a recollection or prediction - an explicit statement by Sen. Blackburn.

If you use term like homophobic, others could consider you as homofilic.

Thank you. Even as a child, maybe because Im an immigrant and learned English in grade school, I was annoyed by the term homophobic. I remember saying a "joke" back around middle school days that I'm not afraid of gay people, I just don't like them.

As an adult now, I don't really care, but just like Ive grown to dislike people that sleep around casually (even though I was one of them from 18-35), I also don't really like the idea of gay hookup culture. Since that seems a lot more popular in the male gay community (I don't know about women), I also generalize that I don't like the popular gay culture either. If liberals/leftists can talk constantly how they don't like trump supporters or conservatives, and even talk down their intelligence levels, I don't see why I'm not allowed to not like someone who believes and does things I don't like.

Calling people like me homophobic doesn't really resonate to me and basically makes me ignore anything beyond that.

Using disparaging labeling shows lack of arguments and usually used by those who are scared.

Hit the nail on the head. This is a bald-faced attempt to suppress LGBTQ people from public life - even the possibility that content could fall under KOSA will make studios / businesses deem Queer content or characters to be "too legally risky" and refuse to publish it

Want to solve the stupid children access to online crap? Create a portal for them, set up restricted DNS' right in the smartphone as settings made from the ISP (and more) and you'll solve that problem. Or better, give them a netbook to do actual computing instead of wasting time with smartphones.

> Create a portal for them, set up restricted DNS' right in the smartphone as settings made from the ISP (and more) and you'll solve that problem

This is a great idea which is outside the technical reach of most American parents.

For ISP's on request from parents, obviously.

That’s silly. Kids are just going to type in IPs directly.

Was a kid in middle school, did exactly this. Ping the website to get the ip, enter the ip into the browser. Dumb easy and it always worked.

A family oriented ISP service could just firewall out non-approved IP's/domains from a blacklist. Namely porn, gambling, dugs, violent movies, social media...