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139 points stubish | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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hilbert42 ◴[] No.44439416[source]
A resident of said country here. Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society.

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.

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1. theshackleford ◴[] No.44441053[source]
> 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.

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.

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2. account42 ◴[] No.44442063[source]
Which is of course why we don't bother making selling cigarettes and alcohol to children illegal. Except we totally do that because it largely works even if sufficiently motivated individuals can and do get around the restrictions.
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3. theshackleford ◴[] No.44442474[source]
Cigarettes and alcohol are consumbable products that must be acquired again and again. There are already millions of phones in open circulation and you only need to acquire it once.

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.

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4. account42 ◴[] No.44442574{3}[source]
Mobile phone plans are still subscriptions and not buy for life things last I checked.
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5. tzs ◴[] No.44443708{4}[source]
You don’t need a mobile phone plan to use free Wi-Fi to access the Internet.