For example, how about a law that says websites have to restrict access to pornographic content if the client's user agent sets an HTTP header indicating they don't want to see it? Now you don't have any privacy problems because the header contains no personally identifying information -- you don't even have to be under 18 to opt into it. But then parents can configure the kid's devices to send that header, without even impacting the kid's privacy to view content that isn't designated as pornographic, since the header is an opt-in to censorship rather than the removal of anonymity.
Also notice that an academic discussion of sexual identity isn't inherently pornographic but is something that can require privacy/anonymity.
However, as we have seen before, asking nicely in the HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn peddlers better target children. We also know from recorded interviews with these predetors that they don't seem to actually mind exposing kids to porn.
Content filters only affect law abiding users and providers. The hallmark of an effective policy is to make it as easy as possible to comply with it. Setting a header is pretty damn easy to implement and enforce by the government. It also displays trust in law abiding citizen, who will comply with the law, because they know that it serves their best interests, rather than being shoved down their throats against their will.
The alternative will have exactly the same or - far more likely - worse results, because the cost of verifying every user's age is far too high to be implemented by the vast majority of sites on the internet. It's more likely that when law abiding citizens are faced with laws that are impossible to implement that they just throw up their hands up and close up shop or move somewhere else.
In the second scenario their services might still be accessible in the UK and need to be blocked by the UK government, the online safety act achieves essentially nothing in this scenario.
We're talking about a law. If you distribute pornography to someone who sent the header in that request, it would be a violation of the law. But that law doesn't have any ID requirements or privacy problems, unlike the proposed one.
> However, as we have already seen, asking nicely in the HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn peddlers better target children.
To begin with, "targeting children" is preposterous. It assumes that they would not only not care but prefer to have children as users than adults, even though children are less likely to have access to money to pay for content/subscriptions and purposely targeting children would get them into trouble even under longstanding existing laws.
On top of that, the header isn't specifying that the user is under 18, it's specifying that the user agent is requesting not to be shown pornography. It's as likely to be set when the user is a 45 year old woman as a 14 year old boy, so using it to distinguish between them wouldn't work anyway.
Porn companies don't have any kind of monopoly or brand loyalty and the ones shady enough to do something like that are exactly the ones that won't still be in business by the time today's kids are adults, so anyone doing it wouldn't be the one deriving a benefit from it.
Even normal companies don't care about customers decades from now because the thing they do teach in business school is discount rates. A dollar in 10 years is worth less than half that today. Likewise, managers get bonuses and promotions on the basis of present-day profits rather than something that happens a generation from now when they're likely to be at a different company anyway.
The premise that they're expected to do that on a widespread basis is ridiculous. Instead it will be one fool who writes something along those lines in an email which is then published because media companies love publishing anything which is bad PR for someone they don't like, regardless of whether it was ever widely implemented or implemented at all. It isn't an actual business strategy for real businesses.
Targeting them has a lower return than targeting people who are of age.
Specific to targeting teenagers, porn users are mostly under 30, so your statement about 14-18 being around the same as 18-80 is irrelevant. About not being able to pay at 14-17, sure, let's go with that, but they start paying after that. We are talking a few years here. Companies do have incentives to create customers just a few years down the line.
Let me ask a few rhetorical questions. How do you think social media became popular? How did tiktok, snapchat, facebook, instagram become popular? Even yikyak became popular because they targeted teens. Why has so much advertising been targeted to teenagers for decades now? Hell, how did onlyfans become popular? All these companies have massive incentives to target teenagers.
So your stance of these porn companies not targeting teenagers is just being willfully obtuse.
This discussion started from the categorisation error. Technical means should be irrelevant here.
They just want to throw responsibility and blame on parents, so that government dont restrict porn access. Parents are just a tool and scapegoats.
This is a dangerous semantic drift that ignores how teenagers are in the process of developing into adults, and so need the parent supervision of them to be slowly relaxed. (Especially since, if handled poorly, they tend to rebel, and cause much more damage.)
And, as a reminder, not all erotic or erotic-adjacent (or other "adult topics") works are porn,
and depending on the jurisdiction the age of consent is often less than 18
(16 in UK, though I am sure there are important details hidden behind this single number),
though I do understand that there might be new, unique challenges here in the Internet era, with laws that might not have caught up yet.