Ferk

It is exactly because we cannot trust parents to moderate what their children do online that these laws are coming up. I disagree. The reason we cannot trust parents is because we are not making them responsible in the first place… there’s not a system in place to assign them responsibility. So if by trust you mean “blind” trust with no accountability, then sure, we should not “trust” anyone. Instead of controlling the bad parent, we are trying to control everyone else to try and child-proof the world. States require that you get a license, take a test, follow road rules, get your vehicle inspected, and many more requirements. We have these requirements because we know that we should not let an untrained driver on the road. The reason I removed it is precisely because I expected this kind of argument. You are assuming that getting a license is comparable to a sort of age limit permit, but the way I framed my comparison, the equivalent of “getting a license” would be educating the parents and keeping a “parental license”. The parent is the bad driver.

By “this mess” are you referring to ChPr trafficking? That’s like saying that the reason for car accidents being the number one cause of death is that we “leave it to the drivers”. So instead of punishing bad drivers that act recklessly, we explicitly allow them to do whatever they want but instead set up a complex system of smart roads and bumpers with automatic AI driven protections that should be mandatory for every road, regardless if the one driving is a bad driver in a private car or a delivery truck just doing their job.

That’s a slippery slope fallacy. It’s like arguing that there should be no moderation at all, not even fair one, because it opens the door for unfair moderation too… One might as well argue slippery slopes in the opposite direction, the more you reject systems in which you have control, the more incentive they’ll have to promote methods where you’ll have no control.

Standardization of parental controls would be if home routers came with proxy settings that allowed privoxy-style blocking of sites in a customizable way by parents for them to decide which services to allow… and this was done in collaboration with the services so that we can openly decide which services should be blocked… The router could even offer separate Wifi access so that the parents network is separate from the children… Parental controls means the control is local, by the parents… not by the companies. I don’t need to tell any company what age is my kid, all I need is for that company to tell me how can I block access to their services.

I mean, ultimately it can always be worked around… a kid can take the parents credit card or ID card when they are distracted and verify themselves. If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM they are smart enough to be deceitful with their parents.

Would they actually go after the people? I expect they would only go after the companies managing / distributing those systems. That’s the reason companies are complying. People can always look for alternatives… I’m sure there will always be homemade distros without stuff like this made by ragtag groups / communities without much of a corporate structure behind.

I mean… there’s nothing stopping anyone from setting their age to 100 years old. It’s not like they are adding any sort of identification check, from what I gather.

It recently overtook Japan, so it’s 4th now…