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693 points macawfish | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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. int_19h ◴[] No.44564533[source]
But we don't need any government intervention for this kind of thing. You can already maintain such a whitelist yourself, and interest groups can collaborate with businesses interested in maintaining their public image to have a centralized registry of voluntary certification for websites (similar to those ratings for e.g. movies that we already have).

Separately from that, if switching DNS servers is an easy workaround to keep access to porn, kids interested in it will quickly learn how to do so, trading recipes and even downloaded content directly. Ditto with Tor etc.

The fundamental problem here is that it is an attempt to censor something for which there is huge demand among the very group that's being excluded. The only way you can do so that would actually work is full-fledged panopticon, where all communication channels are pervasively monitored.