Australians to face age checks from search engines

Australians are broadly supportive of these kind of actions - there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect.

Can’t say I blame them.

I'm split on it. 100% agree that kids being off social media is better for society. But I can't see how it could be enforced without privacy implications for adults.

Perhaps enforcement at the user end isn't what's needed. A perfect solution is likewise probably unnecessary.

As but one possible example. Common infrastructure to handle whitelisting would probably go a long way here. Just being able to tag a phone, for example, as being possessed by a minor would enable all sorts of voluntary filtering with only minimal cooperation required.

Many sites already have "are you 18 or older" type banners on entry. Imagine if those same sites attached a plaintext flag to all of their traffic so the ISP, home firewall, school firewall, or anyone else would then know to filter that stream for certain (tagged) accounts.

I doubt that's the best way to go about it but there's so much focus on other solutions that are more cumbersome and invasive so I thought it would be interesting to write out the hypothetical.