Until somebody (likely a politician or anti-porn advocacy group) decides to poke the bear and ruin it

It depends. If the law says "you must perform such-and-such steps to verify age" then no, they don't care if you can counter it. If the law says "you must use an approach that is at least x% effective" then yes they do care if enough people counter it.

We already had a half-assed solution, where websites would require you to press the button that says "I am over 18". Clearly somebody decided that wasn't good enough. That person is not going to stop until good enough is achieved.

How about just requiring browser, OS vendors, and phone makers to give parents real child accounts that are easy to use and keep kids off the Internet?

There are a lot of actual solutions that could be implemented that don't invade privacy, but that's the point. These rules are all designed TO invade your privacy. They're designed for you to give up your online anonymity and make you accountable for your speech and actions online.

> They're designed for you to give up your online anonymity and make you accountable for your speech and actions online.

They're designed destroy anonymity to give the in group pretext to persecute the out group. It will be propagandized as accountability but it will be anything but.

Is this serious or meant as satire about us-vs-them framing?

Both can be right. Some people in the debate think it's very important to check ages, while other people want to collect data, and a third group of people want excuses to shut down platforms.

The US is repealing section 230, and it appears to be a pretext for shutting down platforms that don't block anti–Trump speech. Australia has an age verification law that seems to actually be about keeping kids off social media.

I would rather avoid having the government decide what I should run on my devices, private companies are already bad enough.

I'm becoming increasingly cynical that the lack of privacy in online communication is what most of the sponsors of these bills are after, and people thinking of the real harms to children are useful to them.

This would suddenly mean no more custom browsers, no more custom OSes, and I doubt they'd cater to the Linux and BSD crowds with this one. It's something the OSS community has been trying to fight for the last 4 decades. With a full-on government requirement this would lock you to the vetted platforms while letting anything other get in would be illegal for the site owners.

It doesn't mean any of that? The point is that the parent, not the child, is the owner of the device. So the parent can restrict the device they own before handing it off to the child (or the same with accounts on the same device).

That’s what we currently have with parental controls. If they wanted the OS to check for the parent legally being an adult, that would rule out custom OSes and browsers which couldn’t be trusted (by the government) to check for that.

Not really, they'd just have to send the "I'm a child" header if the "I'm a child" flag is set. Linux could have /etc/childlocked set to 1 — a global setting instead of per account isn't ideal, but it would satisfy the law.

If we normalize this shit everyone will lose.

> Reasonable people with common sense don't need to upload scans of their driving licenses and passports

Cue random bans.

> People who claimed age checks wouldn't invade people's privacy don't get proven wrong

And? Is that supposed to change anything?

> Porn site users are forced to create accounts

I'm curious the sites that enforce this like 'your state has banned...' what traffic loss they have. Because I'm not gonna sign up for a porn site lmao, the stigma

I think you forgot :

* authorities get to selectively crack down on sites for not implementing "proper" age verification. The sites never had a widespread problem with grooming to begin with but just so happened to have a lot of other activity that the authorities didn't like.

Having everyone operate in a gray area is dangerous and threatens the rule of law.

Discord does have a problem with grooming.

I did not mean to talk about Discord specifically but all sites which will be required to do age verification.

It wouldn't be hard to imagine a situation where social media sites leaning towards the government (e.g. Truth Social, X or the like) will be getting a free pass on using age verification methods which are easy to bypass while social media sites that are more critical (e.g. Reddit) will be sanctioned into implementing the strictest and most privacy invading measures. The end result is that people choosing the path of least resistance will be lead to the government-leaning sites.

Yes, I think there needs to be a way to do attribute based credentials or provide as anonymous as possible authorization for citizens from the government. Somewhere between DigID and the DECODE projects ABC trials in Amsterdam.

> Everyone wins.

Only if the lawmakers agreed.