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693 points macawfish | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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xp84 ◴[] No.44544217[source]
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.

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Asooka ◴[] No.44545884[source]
I would say the best option, if there absolutely must be age verification etc., would be to have a registry of sites that comply with all regulations and by default devices shouldn't access sites off that list. Basically a giant allolist for verified good sites. The internet is already effectively shrunk to less than a dozen sites for regular users, so this won't impact them, and the rest of us can have real free speech and unregulated internet back by switching DNS servers or some similar trivial change.

Or we move everything not meant for the sanitised internet to TOR hidden services.

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1. xp84 ◴[] No.44552113[source]
I actually agree with this. One would just need Apple, Google, and Microsoft to buy into this and listing a legitimate site on the registry would be adopted as fast as universal HTTPS was. Keeping pubescent kids from mainly learning about sexuality through the lens of often-disturbing porn is a worthwhile goal.

Still need a solution to age-verify without tracking though, or else people would think of it as something to be turned off immediately since Reddit and X would obviously not be on the registry since they host tremendous amounts of porn.

I don't think that's an intractable problem at all, and I think as technologists we should be putting our efforts into building the most trustworthy system for that instead of just campaigning for nothing to change because it's "the parents' problem." Easy for us to say: We're all either not parents, or we're the type who are equipped to properly filter access to the Internet for our young kids. In reality, the single mom of 3 working 12 hours a day is not equipped to "just" set up a proxy server or figure out how to install internet filtering software on the Amazon Fire tablet she got her 8-year-old to watch Spider-Man.