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

So, while I agree that this feels foreign and wrong to me as someone who has experienced "The Internet" for so long, I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.

I'm asking this in good faith.

Given that:

1. The Internet is not an optional subscription service today the way it was in 1995. Every kid and adult has 1,000 opportunities to get online including on the multiple devices every one of their peers owns, which a single set of parents has no control over. So "Just keep them off the Internet/control their devices" seems like a silly "Just" instruction.

2. The Internet is nearly infinite. The author of this editorial says "then install a content blocker on your kids’ devices and add my site to it". This is a silly argument since the whole point is that no one has ever heard of him/her and it's obviously impossible for a filter (let's just assume filters can't be bypassed) can "just" enumerate every inappropriate site even if it employed a full-time staff who did nothing but add new sites to the list all day long.

So given all of that, how do we justify how the Internet must operate on different rules than the offline world does? One can't open a "Free adult library" downtown and allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn. I'd have to check IDs and do my best to keep kids out. It also seems like it would be gross to do so. If you agree with that, why should the Internet operate on different rules?

I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo.

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.

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.