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

All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?

If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details. I don’t want to give this data, and websites shouldn’t want to shoulder the responsibility for it.

It seems like this could work much like Apple Pay, just without the payment. A prompt comes up, I use some biometric authentication on my phone, and it sends a signal to the browser that I’m 18+. Apple has been adding state IDs into the Wallet, this seems like it could fall right in line. The same thing could be used for buying alcohol at U-Scan checkout.

People should also be able to set their browser/computer to auto-send this for single-user devices, where it is all transparent to the user. I don’t have kids and no one else’s uses my devices. Why should I need to jump through hoops?

This goes against the very ethos of the early web. We should not be normalizing any form of this extreme moral overreach.

How did widespread adoption of the libertarian techno-utopianism of the early web work out for society as a whole?

It existed only on the edges, usually in softer pragmatic forms, and stopped a lot of bad ideas as a pressure group.

Characterizing the entire development of software and the internet in 90s-2000s as based on libertarian techno-utopinanism is largely manufactured narrative though. One I keep seeing pop up more and more. Largely by people trying to push poorly though out authoritarian gov-controlled internet by spinning the present internet (and parenting) as a product of some ideological radicalism.

The “freedom” of the early internet was bullshit, because it just meant “freedom to make money” and “freedom from having to deal with the consequences of your products on regular people.”

It most decidedly did not mean “freedom from corporate hegemony” which is how we are where we are now, where children are matched with pedophile groomers[1] and delivered endless advertisements for freelance porn practitioners for profit.

This version of freedom isn’t a free internet at all. That was just a PR pitch. And it wasn’t really a great idea to begin with, since it ends up leading to where we are now.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-06/instagram...