Australians to face age checks from search engines

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.

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.