I was wondering something like this but in a different capacity.
What with certain countries (they know who they are) and their hatred for encryption, it got me wondering how people would communicate securely if - for example - Signal/WhatsApp/etc. pulled out and the country wound up disconnecting the submarine cables to "keep $MORAL_PANIC_OF_THE_DAY safe."
How would people communicate securely and privately in a domestic situation like that?
I feel like this narrative is counterproductive. Sure, it is true that some people advocating for this are doing it out of ulterior motives, but it certainly isn't true for all of them. Telling the people with legitimate concerns that they don't actually care about children is going to push them into the camp of the people who want to take advantage of their concern. In order to actually prevent the kind of damage that these censorship systems can inflict, there probably needs to be an actual discussion about the problem these systems are ostensibly designed to address.
People have to remember this is a political issue and politics is about coalition building. Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
The narrative is necessary because governments advocating for the safety of children are almost always doing so with an ulterior motive, and because people with legitimate concerns are often useful idiots for what turns out to be just another way to ratchet up surveillance and censorship and harass undesirables riding another fever wave of social panic and Christian moralizing.
And large swaths of the general population are nefarious liars who don't actually care about children. If building coalitions requires ignoring that fact, then we're not going to build coalitions. The real world isn't HN, where you're expected to assume good faith at all times, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
> Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
This seems to be working okay for the current administration? Among the issues Trump ran on was demonizing a large swath of the population and vowing some nebulous form of revenge.
> Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
On the contrary! Look at Qanon. They've essentially taken over the Republican party. They not only insulted the bulk of the population, Qanons want them dead. It worked fine.
It is more than some. When Project2025 talks about these laws it leads with keeping LGBT content away from children. They barely talk about actual porn.
We have had age restrictions on physical pornography (magazines, dvd/vhs) and XXX movie theaters for a century, and it didn't threaten the book publishing industry or Hollywood.
As an adult I can’t remember ever having to put my face into a permanent database and be tracked every time I browsed in a bookstore. So this is not a helpful analogy.
Of course some kind of untraceable verification could exist (e.g., a perfectly implemented zero-knowledge proof protocol), and some things might even use it. But if any online age verification in actual use results in traceable identifiable access, then my point stands.
Can you provide an example of how an age verification system wouldn’t require providing some identifying information to the government or a company when accessing content?
An example is the EU Digital Identity Wallet that the EU is in the midst of implementing. This is a system to allow you to store a copy of your ID documents on a device you own that included a secure element. Most people will use their smartphone.
The agency that issues your documents can give you a digital copy that is cryptographically bound to the secure elements in your device.
When you want to prove your age to a web site it uses a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) based protocol to prove to the site that the documents bound to your secure element show that age. Nothing but the fact that they show that age and that they are bound to your element is disclosed to the site.
The ZKP proof protocol communication is just between your device the site. The government that issued your ID is not involved, so they don't know where you have used the ID or even if you have used the ID.
BTW, this is not limited to age. It can be used with any data on your ID. For example if German political forum wanted to verify you were German before allowing you to post you could use this system to disclose to them that your ID has "Germany" in the country field and that would be all that is disclosed.
For those outside the EU, Google has released an open source library for implementing things like this [1].
The EU Digital Identity Wallet is such a system and is currently undergoing testing in a pilot program. They are on track to finish testing this year and member states are expected to start deploying to the public in 2026.
The internet includes porn, but is not limited to porn. Likewise the Internet allows the consuming of content, but also allows the production of content. This is where your analogy breaks down. The end user is both consumer and producer. Take this HN comment for example.
Internet censorship in Russia started around 10 years ago under the pretense of "protecting children". The initial law was kinda funny and relatively innocent: it banned information about drugs and suicide. Because if this information remains freely available, you know, children would get high and kill themselves.
Today the internet in Russia is utterly broken. A VPN or a DPI bypass tool isn't something nice to have — it's an absolute necessity, especially if you communicate with people in other countries.
Oh sorry, I ignore any news about what Trump said. (I know what he’s up to mostly from news about how my government reacts to what he says, but the Epstein stuff doesn’t qualify so I was totally in the dark about that hah)
There are things that are already illegal on the internet. Pirated media is generally illegal, which is meant to protect corporate profits. Most people are okay with such restrictions. But when it's actually about protecting children and forcing these shady companies to enforce their terms of service, it's censorship and control?
The ironic thing is many people who decry forcing these companies to verify age, would be fine with such age verification restrictions on Insta or TikTok.
They are going to start restricting VPN usage as well [1] and I can't even click on a Reddit profile without getting age verification pop up because they commented on a dating advice subreddit once. At the same time I can go on Google images, type "porn" and click filter off without any problems.
I don't know, I just can't get fired up about this, I'm sorry. I don't think children have an absolute right to VPNs. There are a ton of things children can't have access to. They don't have full rights as adults, so I feel a bit ambivalent.
As someone with kids I care deeply about the harmful stuff my children will get exposure to. And I'm worried about this as a negative influence, especially to boys, much more than I'm worried about smoking, vaping, drugs, guns, and most other things. This can absolutely wreck your relationships, and it's just not practical to control on a family level. Over 25% of teenagers have ED and it's going up. That can't be good. And for girls it can lead to risky or overall degenerate behavior due to changing expectations and influence.
So many people here pretend like there's no problem.
My point ultimately is that this is a non-solution (websites that don't have verification) (keep in mind they never solved piracy) that is causing collateral damage (non-pornographic content).
> They have surely ignored demands to censor Wikipedia in more authoritarian countries. What makes the UK different? Extradition treaties? Do they even apply here?
The UK has the authority to arrest them (anyone who owns a website) if they ever set foot in the UK if they feel they either haven't censored it adequately enough or refuse to do so.
It's one of the reasons why Civitai geoblocked the country.
Proper title: UK Expands Online Safety Act to Enforce Preemptive Censorship For “Priority” Offenses
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