Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

Flip it on its head.

An age verification requirement might stop your 12-year-old from accessing a porn site headquartered or hosted in the US, but it will do nothing to keep your kid from finding porn on any of the thousands (tens of thousands? more?) of websites hosted in various other countries who don't care about this sort of thing.

These sites are (or will be, if US-based sites become inaccessible) just as easy to find, and just as hard to block with normal parental-controls style content blocking.

Requiring age verification in the US doesn't solve the problem. It just stifles free speech and turns us even more into a Christian nanny-state. The people pushing these laws don't care about children, in reality. They care about banning pornography in the US, and this is one step on that road.

> If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true!

That's not the issue. The issue is that it's impossible to achieve the stated goal (making it impossible or even hard for children to access adult content), period. Whether or not the age-verification is done in a privacy-preserving manner is irrelevant.

There are two ways to "solve" this problem. One is better parental controls, but this will always be a cat-and-mouse game, and will never be perfect. The other is to accept that your kids will sometimes see things that you don't want them to see. That's how the world has always worked, and will continue to always work. Be there for them to provide context and support when they run across these things by accident and are confused or upset, and punish when they seek it out against the rules and boundaries you've set for them. You know... be a parent, and parent them.

Are they actually just as hard to block though? e.g. I don't see much reason to allow traffic to any Russian or Chinese IPs for any reason from my network. To be honest a default blacklist to any non-American IP seems like it'd not cause much trouble for my family, and then if there were some educational or FOSS or whatever sites in Europe, those could be whitelisted on a case by case basis.

Similarly the only expected VPN traffic in my network would be inbound to my wire guard server/router. Everything else can be banned by default.

Blocking every country outside the US is simply admitting failure here.

How so? Why would I not default filter e.g. Iran or Chad or El Salvador or most of the world on my home network? I can always unblock a specific IP if needed, but chances are that will never happen.

My kids aren't old enough for computers yet, but I'm mostly of the mindset that a whitelist or curated offline cache (at least for anything on the web) is the sanest approach for younger kids. Outside of .gov, .edu, a handful of discussion forums, and stuff not relevant to them like shopping/banking, there's honestly not a lot of utility to the web. If they end up interested in programming, reference material can be kept offline, libraries downloaded through a proxy repository, etc.

You need to add Canada, UK, Australia, Japan, etc to that list to actually achieve what you set out to accomplish. Which then does more harm than what you’re trying to prevent.

He’ll realistically the US doesn’t make the cut either.

Why? Concretely, what would I be trying to allow in Japan? Don't they mostly communicate in Japanese anyway? The US has things like local government, schools, businesses, clubs, organizations, etc. Because the US is where we live. That makes it inconvenient to default block the US. Australia has what that is relevant to us? I don't see any .au in my browser history. Or .jp. Or .ca. There is some ac.uk, granted, but that could probably be kept to a small whitelist. I highly doubt anyone would notice for years if ever if I blocked Japan or Australia. It's a near certainty that no one would notice if I blocked all non-English parts of the web.

Are US organizations hosting in Canada for some reason? They probably wouldn't go further than that for latency reasons.

There's the separate problem of foreign companies having US points of presence, but assuming these laws expand, I'd imagine that would eventually lead to liability for services like cloudflare providing the endpoint/hosting on US soil.

It's not about blocking it all. It's about blocking some, removing the monetary incentives to entice children from major players. It's about stopping some of the addiction and damaging effects. Just like we limit alcohol but kids still drink, or vape etc. They still do it, but it requires more effort and that barrier can be a very real barrier to addiction formation.

I assume you buy some non US products and many .com address are hosted outside the US by non US companies.

Gigabyte.com for example makes a great deal of computer parts like graphics cards and it’s hosted at 103.130.100.144 which geolocates to Taiwan, Province of China.

bmw.com 160.46.226.165 Germany

Now some of them will route US users to US servers to lower their ping, but that’s an added expense that not everyone pays for.

Im hosting my site on an IP in the US, just because it was the best hosting option. If the US laws change so that either a) I am liable or b) the hosting provider wont host me. Then of course I would have to move to another, non US, provider. And I wouldn’t be alone so the U.S internet would probably be a lot smaller than it is now.

> It's about stopping some of the addiction and damaging effects

I used to think this was a valid point, but I read something that changed my opinion completely. Pornhub, plus other large sites, have a lot of attention on them. They're a long way from perfect but they do self police, probably far more than anyone here knows, because they don't want to get banned. If you get rid of them, you're boosting smaller and far nastier sites that don't self regulate anywhere near the same amount.

To state it simply, if you block Pornhub, curious children will still find porn, but it'll be far worse.

It's not the same as banning sale of physical items like cigarettes. It's more like if you banned cigarettes but then all the children went and got black market cigarettes that are 50% asbestos.

That's still not giving a concrete reason. Why would I need to access gigabyte.com? I can't even buy their products there; I'd have to buy them on something like Amazon. Firmware updates? If it works I'm not going to change it. If it doesn't, I'm going to return it. If products try to reach out to their manufacturers on their own that's twice the reason to default block as much as you can.

> The other is to accept that your kids will sometimes see things that you don't want them to see. That's how the world has always worked, and will continue to always work. Be there for them to provide context and support when they run across these things by accident and are confused or upset, and punish when they seek it out against the rules and boundaries you've set for them. You know... be a parent, and parent them.

Would you say the same about drugs?

Well, yes. It's exactly like that for drugs too. You can take great time and care to vet every person your kid interacts with outside of school, or keep them monitored 24/7 all you want. But that doesn't stop someone from passing them a blunt in the restroom at school.

Looking up manuals, researching products before purchasing them, there’s a bunch of reasons to go to a manufacturer’s website.

Firmware updates can fix compatibility long after a purchase, it’s not just a question of whether something works on day 1 but day 540. IE why isn’t this EV charger taking to the solar inverter so it preferentially charges the car over sending energy to the grid? Firmware fix and suddenly it all works.

For children though? Supposing we were able to be effective at making it hard to host free porn with no ID in the US, why not make kids access to the Internet US-only by default plus a generous allow-list (it's easy to add exceptions for educational and other harmless sites like say, BBC, foreign universities, etc)

Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though? Nobody's saying that grown-ups should be blocked inside a US-only Internet. We're saying that cleaning up US IP space from free no-questions-asked porn would mean that parents could allow children more freedom by choosing to allow traffic only to US IPs by default. Just like you could allow your 10-year-old child to roam around a mall if (but ONLY if) you knew it didn't have stores demonstrating sex toys out in front of them.

You personally adding exceptions for every beneficial foreign website isn’t so trivial. Using someone else’s software to do this for you is more realistic.

However this is just a cost vs benefit tradeoff. If looking at porn instantly killed a kid or caused significant harm then going to extremes would be worth it, but the benefit of such an approach is minimal. There’s a bunch of metrics that tracked kids as internet porn became a thing and the net impact is effectively zero on metrics like suicide, self worth, promiscuity, age of first sex, etc. Instead the correlation goes in the other direction.

Blocking social media on the other hand is much easier and backed up by a lot of research.

> Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though?

Because they're interested in it. I was installing Linux when I was 9 because I thought it was cool.

If my parents had walled me off into a foam internet safe-room, it would have stifled one of my lifelong interests that led to my career, and bred trust issues and resentment against my parents.

I don't really believe it. It's the big sites that have the monetary backing to employ the dark algorithmic patterns and monetization schemes.

I don't really see much of an issue with the content of the porn if that's what you mean by nastier sites. To me it's more like if you ban cigarettes and now kids are all buying black market cigarettes without nicotine.