Complains about mollycoddling.
> a better approach would be to limit
Immediately proposes new mollycoddling scheme.
Yes, right now search engines are only going to blur out images and turn on safe search, but the decision to show or hide information in safe search has alarming grey areas.
Examples of things that might be hidden and which someone might want to access anonymously are services relating to sexual health, news stories involving political violence, LGBTQ content, or certain resources relating to domestic violence.
Which that one kid will tell everyone if they don't.
seams like long term slow burn to Gov tendrils just like digital ID and how desperate the example came across as to show any real function, contradictory even.
Pivot, what about the children. small steps and right back on the gradient of slippyslope we are
This wouldn't allow them to watch gambling ads or enjoy murdoch venues.
Yes, that empire exported itself to where it would have the greatest effect—cause the most damage.
This seems out of place and unrelated. If anything Gen Z and presumable Alpha, eventually, are more religious than their parents.
The ruling class in the west are generally extremely anti-religious. They have a good reason to be - the biggest religion in the west is anti-wealth (the "eye of the needle" things etc.) and generally opposed to the values of the powerful.
The US is a sort of exception, but they say things to placate the religious (having already been pretty successful in manipulating and corrupting the religion) but very rarely actually do anything. I very much doubt the president (or anyone else) in the current US government is going to endorse "give all you have to the poor".
That is true. I spent my time coding a 2D game engine on an 486, it eventually went nowhere, but it was still cool to do. But if I had the internet then, all that energy would have been put into pointless internet stuff.
And for me it was a place to explore my passions way better than any library in a small city in Poland would allow.
And sure - also a ton of time on internet games / MUDs, chatrooms etc.
And internet allowed me to publish my programs, written in Delphi, since I was 13-14yo, and meet other programmers on Usenet.
On the other hand, if not for internet, I might socialise way more irl - probably doing thing that were way less intelectually developing (but more socially).
It just hit me that I need to ask one of my friends from that time what they did in their spare time, because I honestly have no idea.
YouTube didn’t start until 2005! Even just getting Flash working to watch Home*Runner was an effort.
You are wrong to blame the Internet (or today LLMs). Do not blame the tool.
Sure I consumed sex when I was a kid, but I did a fuckton of coding of websites (before JavaScript caught up, but in JavaScript) and modding of games. I met lots of interesting, and smart people on IRC with mutual hobbies and so forth. I did play violent games, too, just FYI, when I was not making mods for them.
Sure, there was a lot of dicking around, but overall it was positive.
The worst content out there is typically data-heavy, the best - not necessarily, as it can well be text in most cases.
Random visual internet content? Too many possibilities, too large a surface area to cover.
The last one is difficult because you need a common standard, either someone becomes a monopoly (or two or three quasi-monopolies such as google/apple) or better still this is one of few cases where government regulation could do more good than harm.
I think China is already close to the last phase at least in cities, going down the government regulated route?
This is highly country dependent of course - in some places shops must accept coins by law, even if it's so unusual that you have to roll a critical success to get the right amount of change back.
I would like a world where we can give children physical pocket money rather than some abstraction, and they don't need a smartphone of their own to check their balance. But we'll probably have to fight for that at some point.
30,000 penalty units for violations. 1 unit = $330 AUD at the moment.
This would be completely and utterly unenforceable in any capacity. Budget smartphones are cheap enough and ubiquitious enough that children don't need your permission or help to get one. Just as I didnt need my parents assistance to have three different mobile phones in high school when as far as they knew, I had zero phones.
Even if you could stop phones, you wont stop them from accessing it from literally a near infinite supply of other devices.
It's pure and utter fantasy.
Why? If you read the original legislation https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
You get 30,000 civil penalty units if you are a scumbag social media network and you harvest someone's government ID. You get 30,000 civil penalty units if you don't try to keep young kids away from the toxic cesspool that is your service, filled with bots and boomers raving about climate change and reposting Sky News.
This absolutely stuffs those businesses who prey on their users, at least for the formative years.
And when I think about it like that? I have no problem with it, nor the fact it's a pain to implement.
The framing that explicit material is bad for kids, while probably true, is besides the point. Lots of things a parent could expose a child to could be bad, but it's always been seen as up to the parent to decide.
What the government should do is ensure that parents have the tools to raise their kids in the way they feel is appropriate. For example, they could require device manufactures implement child-modes or that ISP provide tools for content moderation which would puts parents in control. This instead places the the state in the parental role with it's entire citizenry.
We see this in the UK a lot too. This idea that parents can't be trusted to be good parents and that people can't be trusted with their own freedom so we need the state to look after us seems to be an increasing popular view. I despise it, but for whatever reason that seems to be the trend in the West today – people want the state to take on a parental role in their lives. Perhaps aging demographics has something to do with it.
Why should this be the government's responsibility rather than the parents'?
For the same reason that the government limits smoking and alcohol. Because the parents can't/won't.
But for a phone? A child/early-teen shouldn't be able to afford a phone nor contract with a cellphone-service-provider being underage. That should be collaboration enough. If they got a phone beforehand, it's because the parents themselves got it for them.
Even considering a mid teen starting work, buying a phone and using it with WiFi, they can only really own things with the parents' approval. They can't really use it enough to form an addiction without the parents noticing and having the opportunity to confiscate it.
I feel a lot of Australians think the government is more mollycoddling than it is, it's hard to think of an actual policy in Australia that is outside of the norm of the Western world.
That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.
Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuff they'll see online especially so teenagers (they'll find that one way or other) but it's more about the distraction smartphones cause.
Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport.
It goes without saying that smartphones are designed to be addictive and we need to protect kids more from this addiction than from from bad online content. That's not to say they should have unfettered access to extreme content, they should not.
It seems to me that having access to only filtered IP addresses would be a better solution.
This ill-considerd gut reaction involving the whole community isn't a sensible decision if for no other reason than it allows sites like Google to sap up even more of a user's personal information.