There is a surprising amount of engineers who don’t understand what’s happening. So they deal with it as if it’s a funny thing… yeah if two police officers come knocking your door with hard data, you will just explain… and yeah, I mean kids, can bypass it… right? Wrong. This is not 1995. They can make very harsh laws and they can make it borderline impossible to bypass should some authority choose to do so.
The danger here is control: total and absolute control of who will be able to see what, at any given time. Once upon a time this was a hard problem, not anymore.
The last time I had police knocking at my door, it was a lot more than two, and they were readying their battering ram when I opened, and then immediately swarmed me and told me to sit down, and then I just explained and they realized their warrant was for a different address and they left. It was scary in the moment, but I never had a gun pointed at me and I wasn't even touched, so overall it left me with a rather positive impression of how search warrants are executed in Germany.
By all means, if you have an adversarial relationship with the state, fight every expansion of its power tooth and nail. But conversely, if you think that everything is going basically fine and the police are reasonable folks overall, then giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
> giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
This only makes sense if you have no concept of "future", wherein different, less reasonable people can gain power. This should be especially obvious in Germany, where and adversarial relationship with the state can be easily had by merely criticizing it.
Would you think the same thing if you happened not to be there, came home half an hour later to find your apartment ransacked with the door smashed in, and had to wait a few months for compensation for the repairs?
Unfortunately, reasonable men, perhaps virtually all reasonable men, can and will become more corrupted by expansive power. The fact that they were not corrupted when they had less leverage on the populace doesn't mean they will behave differently than other historical German (/human) apparats when they have a bit more of the intoxicating liquor.
>r warrant was for a different address and they left.
I am sorry but this is not something that I find "reasonable" or "positive impression" unless small children are the instigators or low stakes events are involved. If armed men are barging into sacred spaces they need to be able to triple, quadruple check they are performing what the warrant says and if not then nothing else they are doing shall be trusted either. Invading a home uninvited is a life and death matter and there is no room for policeman who make such glaring mistakes even if the natural untrained or undisciplined random person naturally might.
I truly believe unfettered access to endless scroll dopamine is bad for adults, but even more terrible for a developing mind. It reduces attention span, increases anxiety, etc. Pushing the onus on parents for healthy internet consumption is probably not effective because most families have both parents working jobs and can't be on top of their kids 24/7.
Now... how to effectively address this problem without introducing a dystopian surveillance state? I don't have a good answer.
You want a proposal? Make a kids-only set of sites. And then make hardware/software that can access only those sites. Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites. You can allow companies to register that they are one of these kid friendly sites with the additional regulation that would entail. Then make a kid having hardware that can access the normal Internet like having a beer in the US. Now perhaps you can find a hole in this, but it can be patched with technology and the right regulation.
That we aren't doing something like this gives the game away. How the EU is going about this means the point of all of this has nothing to do with children and everything to do with controlling political speech.
PS Yea, I know its a very vague suggestion, it can still be implemented
One issue that I see with this type of system is that it doesn't allow for parental/guardian oversight of what kids are doing or discussing.
Ever gone down the auto-suggestion rabbit hole on YouTube Kids? You start getting into weird and potentially disturbing territory much more quickly than you'd expect.
That's a good point. However, its possible to police YouTube Kids without destroying free speech. Policing the entire Internet and everyone else...not so much. That's the whole point of having the companies providing "kids" sites to register and have a specific set of regulations about the "kids" sites. Perhaps those regulations include parental controls.
You have to stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a public health official.
'Something impossible for kids to bypass' is not the goal. It's akin to evaluating a flu vaccine on the standard of zero breakthrough cases. Such a standard has no relevance on the efficacy of the vaccine.
Likewise for underage internet access. Proponents would be happily satisfied with 90% compliance. They really don't care that coverage isn't complete or circumvention is complete. Once you realize that, you can start constructing counterarguments that dismantle the claim that digital IDs would solve the problems they're supposed to.
There is discussion about LLMs, models, CSAM, undressing people with AI, and posting those images to places.
No handy wavy stuff, makes this problem go away due to filtering at creation. That's because, open models are a thing. So you either ban all open models, or maybe make it a crime to publish uncensored models, or you punish what individuals do on the internet.
Slander and libel and defamation are a thing, and have been a thing forever, millennia. Suddenly, on the open and free internet, for barely an eyeblink, anyone could say anything with zero liability and responsibility.
Then, 2010s came. Then, doxing of people we didn't like, or didn't agree with, became OK. So suddenly, it was OK to "out" a person, but not to just force everyone to be de-anonymoized. In other words, unpopular opinions? Yeah, that's OK to remove the cloak.
And with AI, everyone and their dog will be able to render images of anyone they want naked. CSAM. Political lies, made up videos, slander, libel, literal wors in people's mouths, on and on.
What's my point?
Well, just as 2000 brought a new world to people, 2025 is doing the same.
This is only going to get worse. And I fully agree, the dangers for "control" are going to exist. But the dangers of people posting all of this stuff, has hit the point where a lot of people are uncomfortable with it. And if you think Grok creating CSAM is bad, then you must think anyone creating CSAM is bad. Or anything. So how to you prevent the harm?
Well really, you either heavily restrict software. Open LLMs, or?
You make people posting this stuff liable.
The world is at a fork. Everything will change. Because banning software requires immense control over hosting software, but so does deanonymizing the internet. And really, this is inline with how the political and societal landscape changes.
It's only been 20 years since a lot of people were on the Internet, and only 10 years since I'd label it 'mainstream'. As in, even grandma uses it. And so, now the laws are coming, as legislation and law and change takes time for politicians, and political bodies.
We're here. Right now. This is the moment.
So I 100% guarantee that absolutely nothing will stop the path to liability for slander, libel, and more that is coming. Nothing. Whatever it takes, you can be sure it will happen.
So how will it happen?
Well, by knowing who to sue.
Like it or not, that's the truth. And no, I don't like it myself.
I want the right to not be identified.
I also want the right to SELF identify.
I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability. I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify. The cost of running LLM botnets is going down. I cannot imagine how the next cycle of elections is going to be like on all countries. I understand the right to remain anonymous, that should remain, but that state should not be the default on these massively big platforms. Our brains and political systems are not designed for this.
And no, "get people to get rid of their smartphone voluntarily" like I see on the comments is not going to happen.
> I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability.
It is trivial to demonstrate that this is incorrect (despite sounding plausible). There's plenty of incredibly toxic behavior to be found all over facebook.
Among other considerations it's worth noting that most of the usual social feedback mechanisms are missing from typical online interactions.
> The cost of running LLM botnets is going down.
Agreed that this is an existential threat to anonymous discourse as it is typically implemented.
I'd wager the amount on FB is orders of magnitude _more_ than on 4chan. 4chan's average severity is likely higher, though. They're different problems, but saying that online toxicity only exists on anonymous sites is naive at best.
>I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify.
You can do that already, Facebook is pretty close to exactly what you're talking about. They do a lot of work to identify real people and de-prioritize spam/bots. You can configure your account to only be able to interact with real people if you want. Many people like anonymity though, it's important for speaking truth to power and discussing topics which are outside the Overton window.
There's a good reason that many of the United States' founding fathers used pseudonyms when writing. Anonymity and real freedom of speech are foundational to democracy. If you can put someone in jail for saying something that the government doesn't like, then the government will be able to steer discourse towards outcomes it deems acceptable, even if those outcomes subvert the will of the people.
There's no real need to have the government force all websites to always authenticate all humans. The only real argument for such a system is to move us toward dystopian authoritarianism.
The physical world has age checks when kids attempt to enter a premises with dangerous or unsuitable content - eg bars, casinos, strip joints. These seem largely accepted as a good thing. Why do so many seem to feel that the same protections are so outrageous when applied in the virtual world? Honest question, I can see both sides.
When you are age-checked in real life, the bouncer glances at your ID, checks the date of birth, checks the photo and lets you through, having not remembered a shred of that information. You are just one in a crowd of a thousand. If you're old enough, they may even wave you through without looking at any real data.
When you're age-checked on the internet, a scan of your ID goes on the website, then is likely forwarded to a helpful third party business. It extracts every bit of data, analyzes your picture, then carefully saves and catalogues everything, and returns True to the website, which may have also stored their own copy of this data, depending on how the process is implemented. This data is now in their hands forever. If, at any point in the future, you access another age-gated website that uses the same third party business, now there's nothing stopping them from correlating that private browsing data. How juicy. Adtech will love that. As you keep handing out your ID left and right, every single bit you divulge is recorded somewhere, forever. And at the end of the day, this is just moving data around, so there's nothing preventing your government, or the host's government, or all governments from passing a law that asks for that data to be shared with them - just in case, you know. Now there's many copies of your exact identity floating around, just one data leak or legal request away from revealing everything you've ever done tied in a neat little package. Real life ID is limited by constraints of practicality and our physical world, digital ID is limited by nothing.
And this is the best-case scenario I'm describing here. Imagine if they ask us to show our identities publicly, not just to the corporate all-seeing-eyes. Everyone would become doxxable by default, their whole life exposed and searchable, the mere idea of having secrets would be wiped away, communities made for marginalized or at-risk people would all fall silent.
Yes, there are ideas about zero-knowledge proofs and legislation about data privacy and whatever else. But these don't benefit either corporations or governments, and the average Joe doesn't care about putting his real name on everything, so we can pretty safely assume that this won't happen.
We don't talk about age verification like in a bar. We talk about age verification like in the internet, where every of your step generates data. So you don't verify your age, you verify your identity.
It's like you step in a bar and someone writes down every word you say, every drink you order and every person or place you look at. And then he places your complete name and address on it and stores it in his closet to pull it out when he needs it.
Would you really enter a bar, casino or strip club when it would look like this?
We don't talk about children, we talk about everyone here.
This initiative has the ID "ECI(2026)000011". If I understand this correctly, that means there have only been eleven citizen initiatives this year? Is that system working as designed, because that's a shockingly low number.
Edit: the initiatives themselves also have shockingly low numbers of signatures. A few thousand. A million are required for the EC to take notice. This system seems a bit shitty. But maybe I'm misunderstanding it.
I don't think that's too surprising, as even if you get 1 million of signatures the only thing you will get is "response from Commission". So they can reply with legalese for "get bent" and there goes your million signatures.
I'm glad they mention privacy preserving and being voluntary. It's possible to make digital ID that allows selectively revealing attributes without identity, and that could solve problems like bots, socketpuppets, etc along with reasonable age-gating. It could be an ideal internet if it's properly applied. The problem is it's difficult to verify all the promises are being kept, and if they're not it instantly becomes a true dystopia. And sites could use it in inappropriate ways resulting in discrimination.
So if i can not circumvent the surveilance- can i pack my wanted unsurveiled stuff into harmless data and send them- basically use the surveiled Internet as a UDP layer - over which my hidden unsurveiled internet goes via TCP?
Can you be more specific? The only related court cases I'm aware of are U.S. The Crew lawsuit which seems to have reached settlement recently and the French case regarding which I haven't seen any updates since it's filing.
They... didn't? They got a petition response from the EU that was more positive than they had expected, and a response from the commission is not court: the response phrasing literally leaves the door open.
Heck, the parallel movement in the US even had a major legislative victory in California, so... what are we talking about?
They’re still around so I don’t see why having a legal setback is the same thing as going poorly. They are attempting their mission again with new bills in US and EU.
I have a hard time figuring out whether most of the comments are genuine or not.
Are you guys really in favor of giving governments and police corps more control and more power so that you are observed, monitored, restricted because "the internet is dead", "think of the children" and "you need to know who to sue"?
I think the scenario posited here is the worse possible one where we are still chronically online but on a dead internet while being fully and relentless surveilled.
The internet of the future is an IQ test. Are you smart enough to get in, do your work in a focused manner, and get out so that you live your life? Many, many people will fail this test.
Counterpoint: meatspace is awful unless you're a normie. Christ, the day I got out of my small town and into a major city university dorm room with fast Internet was the day my life opened up. I found people with my interests. Etc.
"The Internet sucks. Get offline," is the battle cry of someone who likes Marvel movies and the book that Target has at the checkout line, or lives in one of about five cities in the USA.
Oof. You're missing out if you think meatspace is limited to target and big American cities. I agree that the web makes it easy(er) to connect with others in niche interests, but in-person experiences can be so diverse, vibrant, stimulating that I understand the simmering tug some have toward wanting the internet to become unusable. I agree with sibling that a "healed" internet, while very optimistic, is the ideal case.
Sincerely, your fellow terminally online HN commenter.
> You're missing out if you think meatspace is limited to target and big American cities.
The joke about middle-of-nowhere towns is that the only thing for teens to do in meatspace is to go to the Walmart. Because there's nothing else to do.
When people say things like this, they mean the good parts of the internet, e.g. real people who are able to be honest because a pseudonym allows them to say things they would be punished by evildoers for saying if the evildoers could identify them. Taking that away doesn't get you out of the engagement-optimized ad funnel, it just makes that be the only thing left.
The Internet is fine and the bad parts will heal or remove themselves if we remove the actual bad thing: smart phones. The Internet is not supposed to follow you around hence the term "In Real Life" or "meatspace". If you want to be "terminally online" you need to sit your ass down in front of a computer for hours.
> if we remove the actual bad thing: smart phones.
That's a tall order, although there are plenty of reports of younger people switching to "dumb phones." I've switched to one myself. But how could you possibly stop it? They are terrible -- now that I don't have one anymore it's insane how many people are constantly staring at their phones, walking on the sidewalk, crossing the street, etc. It's really depressing.
But ya, at this point I don't care if parts of the internet are fine and if I had the power to burn it all down, I would.
You need to first provide a passport image + 5 angled selfies + bank statement + proof of employment to the Peoples Democratic European Union before you can sign.
The internet's (at least as we knew it) days were numbered as soon as the dot com bubble happened. It changed from a thing to share info to a thing to make money. It's irrecoverably corrupted and this blatant overreach for everyone's PII is just a symptom.
I'm reasonably confident that in the relatively near future, the Internet will be so overrun with bots and other worthless "content" that people will flock to platforms that confirm IRL identity.
Think what that would mean for your average person in a country that didn't like their government...for instance in Russia. You clearly haven't thought through the consequences of your suggestion.
You assume you will always like and agree with your current government. And there are European countries who already jail people for political speech the government doesn't like.
You don't need IRL identity. You just need invite-only. Discord is great for this. I've run so many fandom events over Discord, and we never have a problem with bots, and it's very fun creating fanfiction, fanart, calendars, zines, and talking about the other aspects of our lives every day.
You don’t need IRL identity, you just need persistent reputation. That reputation can be attached to a pseudonymous identity or an IRL one. But the design of most modern social media is to detach the “content” from the context of the author. The feeds you subscribe to are funnels that channel atomized bits of content to you. Some of it may be authored by them, but it’s the platform that intermediates your relationship to that content more than the creator. The creator is subordinated to it.
A different design logic, and the logic of the blogosphere that preceded it, much more tightly prioritized following a blogger or poster and interpreting everything you see in light of who was posting it. The trust is placed in the account you follow.
We've moved "identity" to a few large monopolists. Who lack all incentive to properly "enforce" it. And whose interest are perpendicular to people owning their identities (being able to take them elsewhere).
"Persistent" reputation won't change that. Because on the internet nothing is persistent, without a central party enforcing it to be so. And as said above, the ones in charge of it now, don't want to enforce it really. You don't own your domain, you don't own your IP, you don't own your feeds, "content" etc. The infrastructure that routes people to your correct "reputation", isn't yours, it's controlled and owned by Big Tech, governments, and some smaller companies. Your feed can be taken offline or away from you in a whim. Access to your blog isn't yours. Not even if you host it on a rasberry-pi in your cupboard.
Aside from maybe some blockchain shenanigans, that is. Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum are the only decentralized "pseudonymous" identity providers that could step into this, but both are ridiculously costly and complex. And wholly unsuited to route content. Systems designed for this, like Tor, aren't really up to the task either. Just look at how insanely hard it is for "Content" that governments oppose, to remain online (e.g. on the tor network). Possible, but so complex, so fragile, that it's not a practical system to use en masse. Yet it's the only working system that comes closest to really owning content in the broad sense.
So it makes perfect sense to turn to the systems that have done this "persistent reputation", aka "identity" for centuries now: Governments.
Compared to Big Tech, they're more decentralized - there are far more governments worldwide "doing identities" than there are FAANG corporations. Hell, even within the US or within my country alone, there are more.
Compared with all other systems, we can control them, push them into a direction we want them to go - democracy. Far from perfect. Bad even. But the least worst way to have some "persistent identity" we can get. Unfortunately.
You’re trying to engineer a social interaction. Stop that!
People remembering your handle is persistent, and people remembering if they had good or annoying interactions with you is persistent reputation that exists in the minds and interactions between different people. These are things people naturally do. If people don’t recognize your name and see it come in a trusted spot they just don’t trust you.
How tech breaks this is deprioritizes the people in the interactions. Instead of sending messages you use a “like” button to be intelligible to the platform. You don’t see the people putting stuff on your feed, it gets fed to a timeline that cuts it off from all context and atomizes it for your consumption. It’s the UI/UX that drives this. Even compare Reddit and HN with old forums. On forums like 25% of every post is just static bits of self-expression. There’s a PFP, the username is bigger, there’s often a big signature block. All of this makes the peoples’ posts feel like a person talking to you rather than text blocks that happen to have a tiny username and timestamp on it.
My point is that you don't own your handle. Therefore you aren't your handle.
Edit: to clarify: You aren't your handle, because it can be taken away from you, can be injected, blocked, overridden, etc.
My technical rambling then went on about how or when we can make this "handle" decentralized so it cannot be taken away from you. Hard. As proven in practice. Almost impossible.
My name is maintained by a government. It is a "handle" that could be taken away too, but is governed in lots of rules, systems and regulations. My face (an extension of my DNA, I guess) is decentralized and owned by me: its the only handle that afaik no one can take from me.
So in social interactions, you're right: reputation, bound to "me", my face, my DNA is all that matters. But online we don't have this. The closest we can probably get is "my name", controlled by governments.
> My point is that you don't own your handle. Therefore you aren't your handle.
This is a good point. I wrote a self-deprecating post to Reddit one time that got flagged by AI or someone who isn't a native English speaker as a "threat of violence." This is almost word for word the exchange that triggered it:
Me: [some in-depth discussion of electrical wiring in a house]
Other person: Wow, thank you so much! I would hire you to fix my wiring!
Me: haha oh I'd probably find some other way to burn your house down
The final line was meant to be a humble way of dismissing the compliment by playing down my expertise. But someone with the power to ban accounts parsed this as "I am going to commit arson."
And so I lost the ability to DM any of my friends. My entire reputation was gone. This was a nearly 20yo Reddit account.
And I can't make a new account and tell people "this used to be me" because then Reddit bans your new account because it's against the rules to create a new account if you've been banned.
Yes, I've created other accounts since then. But I can't ever link them to my old one because Reddit will just ban the new ones. (I tried this, and that's exactly what happened.)
I can't even participate on the same subreddits because there's some algo that recognizes if two accounts have similar subscription habits and does some kind of analysis to guess at if it's a person evading a ban.
I was shocked at first (I was in the mid of organizing an event using Reddit in part for communications, and had to rely on an IRL friend who was helping rn it to speak for me), and then angry, and then just sad.
It's one reason I've begun using one moniker everywhere, and I own that domain name as well. It's the closest I can get to fully owning my handle.
I'm "berkes" almost everywhere. And my domain is my handle as well: berk.es.
So I do the same as you. But I am quite sure e.g. The Great Musk In All His Wisdom will one day either find me annoying and hand over the now discontinued x.com/berkes to someone who agrees better whith His views. Or decides his politics are better served by raising accounts from the deaths and making some AI voice act like me, that spew political messages.
I own "berkes" about everywhere. But nowhere do I really own it. Not even the domain name. The only handle I truly own is some bc1q....... address. One that has -by design- no reputation and one that's impossible to write in pen on the back of a beermat after a nice discussion in a bar.
IMO that is the problem that botspams and focus on IRL identity aims to "solve". Money can't buy competency, therefore popularity, and that undermines economic influence one may have, which is problematic to some.
I think you make a good point and it is well taken. You could be right.
But I still believe that people will care about connecting with an actual person in meatspace. I just can't picture any other result except for complete and total burnout with the fakeness of the web.
I think it's a missed opportunity to not have called it "Stop spying on every EU citizen online". It would make for great headlines and might finally wake people up when they see that the EU has rejected a proposal called that.
"Stop killing the internet" unfortunately means nothing at all to the layman, they will still be using it pretty much exactly as they were before, and governments will just claim "See, internet is still working".
You may be overthinking this. It is privacy that means little to the regular joe. The internet they use every day and it being changed beyond recognition is much more tangible than privacy being curtailed just a little bit more.
And these authoritarian politicians will destroy the internet with these actions. Maybe they will even change society as we know it, and not for the better.
The problem is thinking such initiatives will achieve anything in a bureaucratic system devoid of honest debate and actual democracy.
These citizen's initiatives must at least be tried but simultaneously we must create a new internet forever out of politician reach.
I think it's time that "please let 1800 analytics firms monitor your every browsing habit in exchange for this content" was seen in the same light as "please let 1800 private foreign espionage and propaganda agencies spy on you".
Yes, absolutely...people drastically underestimate how much political propaganda on social media is from targeted foreign operations. Getting children and those propaganda operations off "adult"/anonymous social media would be so beneficial to all of society. The EU is actively doing something else though...I doubt the propaganda operations would even be slowed down by the EU's efforts.
Great point. Reminds me of Biden’s constant whisper-scream “the future of democracy is at stake!”
Like, yeah, it was an accurate statement, but total shit if your goal is to get people up off the couch and into voting booth. Way too abstract and high-minded
>The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age
NO. It really shouldn't. I will not comply. Porn sites can require this shit, but not the rest of the internet. Social media, dating websites, that's up to the users. If kids are on there, that's on the parents. Do your job, be the parent. I'm not going to let lazy good for nothing parents ruin the internet for everyone else.
We can talk, talk, and governments will still move forward. Or we can build an alternative that shows it's possible to get age verification while maintaining privacy.
There is a real way out of it -- the governments can have their cake and eat it too. I published several academic papers to prove it, and I'm open to building and deploying it. Would anyone want to work on this together:
I haven't considered this before with SKG, but if this progresses, it means the EU parliament may choose to take action based on an initiative that potentially only a vocal minority supports [0], while coming across as if they were simply following the will of the people.
Not sure how I feel about that, sounds kind of problematic in retrospect. Especially since there's no mechanism for triggering EU-wide referendums to help this AFAIK.
[0] population of the EU: 452 million, unique signatures required for this: 1 million
A few things you can legally do online without ID or age verification in the US
1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!)
2) Buy "CBD" by the pound
3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it.
4) Order and have delivered wine
But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.
Not for wine, not usually. Wine can be mail ordered, the carrier has no idea what it even is. They might require signature on delivey, but anyone who's dealt with UPS and fedex know they will essentially never look at ID. In high school I used to order wine and they had me sign but I was under 18, the box was non-descript and the delivery man had no idea what it was so a kid signing for it made no difference. It's different than beer or liquor sales where it's under the more recent COVID era exceptions that require checking ID and the delivery person actually knows what it is.
The mail order wine stuff is way older and under way different rules than most other alcohol delivery services.
Did you order it under mail order delivery rules or under alcohol retailer rules? They're quite different. If the person you bought it from offered beer and alcohol as well, you were probably ordering under the retailer paradigm which requires an ID check. If you ordered it straight from a wine producer or exclusive wine seller then it was probably under the mail order framework. The point isn't that all wine purchases aren't ID'd, it's that there is a framework under which you can legally order wine online without an ID check happening -- if you pursue the alcohol retailer delivery rather than wine mail order route you might not be able to do that though.
Not in all states. In my home state of Pennsylvania, it's only legal to have alcohol delivered by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. It is not legal to order directly from producers.
I am not disputing that. I am disputing that "most US states, they require the delivery driver to recheck the ID in person" (the original comment I was replying to). "UPS or fedex has to check" is meaningless since they have no idea what it is and essentially no historical nor practical route to prosecution of a common-carrier deliveryman who has no idea what is in the package and no mens rea for wittingly transmitting alcohol to a minor. The states that require adult signature on common carrier delivery essentially have zero legally binding requirement as the deliveryman in most states can't be successfully prosecuted unless there is mens rea that they had prior knowledge the non-descript package was alcohol and the economics of common carrier delivery practically guarantee they will not check IDs when requested to. Thus the "requirement to check at delivery" for mail order wine is actually just a weakest of suggestions with a wink and a nod with no teeth.
#1 isn't entirely true. It's a soft-gate but you are legally required to verify age on your site before completing the purchase (I run a boutique cigar brand [1]).
Of course not. But literally any excuse that comes to hand will be deployed if it helps the tech industry continue to avoid meaningful consequences. The same handful of companies that have engineered a global surveillance suite that rivals the most tyrannical sovereign governments wildest dreams (and can trivially detect the approximate age of a user) will without a shred of irony deploy legions of paid influencers and other astroturf to decry age verification as an assault on privacy.
But it is an assault on privacy. If "protecting kids" was the goal here they'd push for regulation that forces websites to return standardized metadata that then gets interpreted by the user agent which can be configured by the parent.
Nah, that's a perfectly fine technical solution. Powers that be don't think like that. They understand pulling someone over to check their license, so something like that will do.
sigh If data brokerages, Meta, Google, and Palantir are all staring at you how is it possible to claim privacy is even possible? Like, you have to have a thing before it's possible to assault it.
Even for a "Citizens' Initiative", this stuff is remarkably tone-deaf. "No Digital ID" ignores the very-real need for people to prove their identity to government(-ish) entities online, and to do so in a reliable, cheap and convenient way. Sure, you do not want that ID to become mandatory for publishing or existing on the Internet in general, but that's a separate discussion: demand sufficient protection for anonymous/pseudonymous posts instead, which is absolutely something that needs to be codified as part of basic human rights.
"No age verification" is even deader-on-arrival. Parents are literally screaming at politicians to protect "the children" (as always), but pretty much everything that has been tried so far to silence those screams has failed (remember PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection: that was the last serious contender, and it has been dead for, like, 20 years). Again: demand a way to implement this securely and anonymously, don't take an untenable abolitionist stance or resort to hand-waving in the vague general direction of "parental responsibility": that has been tried, and it's not working anymore.
And, please, stop vilifying the EU in these matters. The UK left the EU, ostensibly so they could make "more sensible laws" in, specifically, respects like these, and they're now leading the assault on basic freedoms with even more fervor. And no, that's not just big-bad-Starmer's fault: it's a preview of what you have to argue against and propose a compromise for instead.
not all parents are screaming this. Only the parents who refuse to parent their children, and conveniently scapegoat society for their parental failings
We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
You could make same exact argument regarding kids health, alcohol abuse, nicotine abuse, all types of addictions, age of consent, and so on.
You can't just have all the safeguards dropped because you think you're doing a good job. Or, even worse, you have no kids and it's your virtues merely projecting.
> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
From both someone involved in raising kids as well as someone who knows a lot of teachers: none of the involved parties want that. Schools are at best for teaching, but never for raising.
I respectfully disagree. Yes, parents should raise their children as in be present in their lives and help them grow and shape themselves. However, schools with the rules, social engagements, and learning is also a form of raising. Teachers, especially in elementary school, are extremely influential for young kids. How teachers behave when somebody is bullied, how they handle questions, basically how they handle anything, forms the minds of young children.
Is it the sole responsibility of a school to ensure well raised (for whichever specific definition of “well”) children? No. However, they are a large factor in the raising of children.
School was an escape from my home life, but it could never fix my home life. As a child who had no ability to determine what constituted "normal" in order to escape my situation, the only real solution for my home life was for me to be born to different parents. I doubt any amount of legislation would have accomplished that.
That's why I think it was a huge mistake to make teachers mandatory reporters. The idea was that they'd report people neglecting or abusing their children, but what happened is the more egregious cases usually learned to just do a half-ass "home schooling" instead so the child never sees a mandatory reporter and then situation is even worse because now the kid has no escape, no access to doctors, etc.
I feel like you must have a very restrictive definition of what constitutes “raising” kids if we’re omitting the place where they spend the majority of their waking hours and the people most of their social universe is based in.
We’ve had a live experiment with this during COVID and it’s pretty clear that kids raised solely at home by their parents fared way worse. Not just on academic metrics, but basic conflict resolution or social skills.
This is one of those comments where I get your point, but have a couple of big "uhm actually"s :point-up: :nerd-face:
I wouldn't think that COVID is a good indicator as this was in no way typical home-schooling. The vast majority of kids were going to school "online," and not schooled by their parents. They were also largely confined indoors with their families all day and all evening.
I'm having trouble making my other point without slipping deep into trying to define "raising," so I'm just going to hit "reply" here.
Raising almost all children in these government socialist barracks is so dystopian. What you call "worse" conflict resolution and social skills I call superior confidence and autonomy. People today are oversocialized.
Don't let kids have an internet-connected phone, the same way they can't have a bottle of wine.
If they really need such device make sure that device is locked to a small list of app/contacts possible.
There's no need to lock down the rest of the internet because the responsible person of such kid can't tolerate their complaints. It is a parenting issue.
You totally ignored the point OP was making! Even if it is a parenting issue, simply declaring that will not make parents parent better. It's the same reason why we ban children from drinking wine, because parents cannot be relied upon here.
Unless your point was that we should legally ban kids from handling phones, which I think is too extreme.
I have seen religious parents been vocally opposed to their children seeing or even discussing anything related to sexuality.
An example from the past:
"The National Legion of Decency, also known as the Catholic Legion of Decency, was an American Catholic group founded in 1934 by the Archbishop of Cincinnati, John T. McNicholas, as an organization dedicated to identifying objectionable content in motion pictures on behalf of Catholic audiences."
You have to appreciate the level of audacity required for a catholic organization to claim they are protecting children from harms regarding sexuality.
Just put your kids in a bubble so not a single adult is the slightest bit inconvenienced by having to exercise any social responsibility for their well being. Easy.
> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
"It takes a village to raise a child." Except these same parents who won't take care of their kids are also the very first who go all "How dare you speak to my child like that! I'm going to have you fired!"
If your way of talking to kids gets you fired, it was atrocious in the first place. "It takes a village to raise a child." is not about carte blanche to abuse any kid that you encounter.
The saying is about kids watching and learning from their environment - from how adults act. If you set up to be jerk or take advantage of random kids that happen to be around, you are teaching them to take advantage of people. And no amount of yelling "their parents are responsible because they did not stopped me" is going to change that.
Parents should be imprisoned if they give children access to the internet. We have to make parents criminally liable. Without a change in incentives, we cannot expect behavior to change. Until then 'parents need to parent' is a slogan and not a solution.
There are also fascists screaming at the government to do other wildly illegal stuff. The lousy parents begging the government to "tread on me" would get wildly better results by spending less time trying to create an authoritarian state and more time with their kids they claim to care so much about.
They're children. They have the internet access you give them. This isn't some unsolveable problem that needs government intervention, my parents were setting up filters so long ago that they're grandparents now.
I suggest that you don't make the filters to hard to bypass (I would do DNS in both a DNS server and /etc/hosts, along with a browser extension), to encourage them to learn about technology. (although that might stop working due to Ai chatbots)
And the solution already exists, one that doesn't empower the government to do some truly heinous shit.
Every power you grant the government is another knife they'll eventually stab you in the back with. Maybe you like your current government, but what about the next one, and the one after that?
Instead, just use the tools you already have access to. I was not opposed when California mandated that applications add parental controls, that's fine. If parents want to restrict their children's internet access, there's a continium there ranging from "prudent parenting" to "child abuse", but that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis. I am, however, rabidly against the state requiring you to dox yourself every time you log into a website, because inconceivably lazy parents can't figure out how to use the parental tools that they already have.
Parenting controls are shit on the end device side. It's not working, it's not even trying to. Nobody would need this blanket approach if parenting controls actually worked.
Back when smoking was more normal we basically did leave it up to Big Tobacco to determine how best to tackle underage smoking and they would literally say insane things like “Oh course we’re not targeting elementary school kids! We’re not monsters! Our advertising doesn’t hit them until they’re in 8th grade at least!”
Expecting platform monopolists and dopamine dealers to design for this is folly. They are wired to try to normalize an unhealthy level of dependence on them. Their business model is addiction.
>Ah, OK, so you admit a problem exists. That's step one...
Okay but for your position to be tenable you have to then go to step 2, which is some parents are incompetent at doing this, and step 3, which is that, nevertheless, their children, who are randomized copies of them genetically, still somehow need and benefit from the filters that their parents can't or won't apply. Then you get to step 4, which is that all of the competent people must suffer so those children can get it from a heavy handed government solution. I don't see how you jointly accept all these steps; it means you want to have a tyranny of the incompetent over the competent. You must jointly assert that they are dumb while placing them up and over the not dumb. That's full on crab-bucket, dysgenics by force ideology.
You do realize that you can just require auths for the kids and not the adults right? It requires a regulatory and hardware solution but its very possible.
PS Also, no solution would ever be perfect. Walls don't deny access, they change traffic patterns. So if it works 99% of the time, its good enough.
Because this is for stupid people, it will be done in a stupid way. They aren't interested in cash bought anonymous auth tokens that require you to be over 18 to the store clerk or whatever. In part this is stupidity, in part this panic is also about "pedophilia" so they want to make sure whoever is talking to their daughter who is using a parent authenticated tiktok account gets arrested promptly because he showed his passport as opposed to being there with an untraceable anonymous auth token he bought for $1.99 at a random convenience store.
You don't allow adults on the kids sites. So your theoretical pedo would have to provide ID to get the "kids" hardware. And the "kids" hardware can't go on the normal/adult/anonymous Internet. Done...
This would require hardware manufacturing. Seems expensive. Locking down hardware is also something I don't want the government getting into. What about poor young suzie who got hit on by a creepy 30 year old briefly after booting linux on an old laptop? Now we have to make everything secure at the firmware level for the "children" etc
They don’t seem to oppose any of that if you read the intro
> We call on the European Commission to propose legislation ensuring that digital identity and age-assurance systems used to access online services in the Union remain voluntary, privacy-preserving and non-discriminatory. Citizens must not be forced to identify themselves to access lawful online content or services unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law. The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age, data minimisation, selective disclosure, open-source implementation, independent security audits, prohibition of cross-service tracking by relying parties, and equivalent alternatives for citizens who do not use a digital wallet.
It has been quite a slippery slope. Services that used to allow password auth have retired them in favour of bank detail login. I can kind of get it, since it's offloading support to the banks, but it's also annoying since the bank logins themselves are a pain to setup, maintain and use (mobile app only).
It would be nice to have some good standard that is less invasive.
At least in Sweden it is because it is a pain to have both bank id and passwords because by contract it is forbidden to allow a user that previous used bankid to ever use password again.
And don’t pay attention to downvotes, that’s part of the game, it’s nothing against you, just accept that sometimes you lose karma :) in some way it’s a good exercise for the ego
The intro indeed doesn't sound too bad, but if you read into the underlying demands, the title is actually quite representative of what's going on here.
Specifically, the requirement to provide non-digital alternatives as well as control over relying parties (i.e. consumers of the 'digital ID' and/or 'age verification' APIs) makes all of this a non-starter.
I mean: non-digital alternatives to digital IDs? I guess that means that nobody should be forced to get a digital ID for access to essential government(-ish) services (like banking), and that's a valid point, but in the context of "stop killing the Internet" just obfuscates things.
And control over RPs beyond GDPR is just pushing it, again, quite on purpose.
As far as I know the only thing that influences change is money. What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things? All of my ideas would be very low traction but there are clever people here on HN that I am sure could come up with a few better ideas.
One of my (probably dumb) ideas is:
- Create a legal presence in a country that does not require being dystopian, relaxed business laws, less regulation, lower taxes, move most of the corporate side of the business there. Take the tax revenue with you. It does not have to be all at once. Make the move a slow boil so they don't see it until it's too late.
Which countries, provinces, regions, states have the least regulation, least dystopian behavior and the least taxes? There has to be a incentive for business leaders and board members to move things around. Bonus if the saved money pays for a Gulfstream G650 ER or two.
> What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things?
Right now the most important thing to inhibiting a dystopia is to break the lock Apple and Google have on approval of mobile code, because it gets used as a fulcrum by authoritarians. Want to ban VPNs? Make the app stores do it. Censor social media? Have them ban every social media app that doesn't censor. Want to track everyone everywhere? Make the phone provide sites and apps with a persistent cross-service tracking ID.
Whereas if ordinary people had devices that worked like PCs traditionally have, banning a VPN from the Microsoft store doesn't prevent you from installing one directly from the developer etc.
And getting this to be possible could be done by any sufficiently large market. If a sufficiently large market e.g. bans attestation and enforces antitrust, it allows an open platform to develop in that country by starting with compatibility with the apps of existing platforms, and then that platform can expand into other markets. Or you can get an iPhone there that you can install a VPN on and Apple can't prevent it, and then those iPhones can be exported into authoritarian countries.
And if you want a financial incentive for this, how about every country outside the US not wanting their local businesses paying the 30% tax to a foreign monopolist?
> As far as I know the only thing that influences change is money.
You are incorrect. The NIMBY movement has been extraordinarily successful despite severe opposition from moneyed interests. Bloomberg lost embarrassingly despite setting records for campaign spending. There are countless similar examples.
The NIMBY movement is moneyed interests. The owners of existing real estate zoned for high density don't want more of it because increased supply lowers prices. The people in an affluent suburb don't want affordable condos anywhere in their school district. This comes at the expense of the poor who then pay higher rents.
I would rather not incite violence on this platform. That just gets a bunch of people put in a cage limiting their career options and potentially "justifies" even greater dystopian actions.
Even EU institutions use cookie banners. Also, if it was just malicious compliance, there would have been years of time to fix the regulations so that such shenaigans would not fly.
I think the problem is that GDPR focuses on consent more than would be prudent. Regulation is usually introduced when some actions are not appropriate even when there was consent. For example, one is not allowed to sell spoiled food, no matter how clear warnings they gave to the customers.
There is a surprising amount of engineers who don’t understand what’s happening. So they deal with it as if it’s a funny thing… yeah if two police officers come knocking your door with hard data, you will just explain… and yeah, I mean kids, can bypass it… right? Wrong. This is not 1995. They can make very harsh laws and they can make it borderline impossible to bypass should some authority choose to do so.
The danger here is control: total and absolute control of who will be able to see what, at any given time. Once upon a time this was a hard problem, not anymore.
The last time I had police knocking at my door, it was a lot more than two, and they were readying their battering ram when I opened, and then immediately swarmed me and told me to sit down, and then I just explained and they realized their warrant was for a different address and they left. It was scary in the moment, but I never had a gun pointed at me and I wasn't even touched, so overall it left me with a rather positive impression of how search warrants are executed in Germany.
By all means, if you have an adversarial relationship with the state, fight every expansion of its power tooth and nail. But conversely, if you think that everything is going basically fine and the police are reasonable folks overall, then giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
> giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
This only makes sense if you have no concept of "future", wherein different, less reasonable people can gain power. This should be especially obvious in Germany, where and adversarial relationship with the state can be easily had by merely criticizing it.
Would you think the same thing if you happened not to be there, came home half an hour later to find your apartment ransacked with the door smashed in, and had to wait a few months for compensation for the repairs?
Unfortunately, reasonable men, perhaps virtually all reasonable men, can and will become more corrupted by expansive power. The fact that they were not corrupted when they had less leverage on the populace doesn't mean they will behave differently than other historical German (/human) apparats when they have a bit more of the intoxicating liquor.
>r warrant was for a different address and they left.
I am sorry but this is not something that I find "reasonable" or "positive impression" unless small children are the instigators or low stakes events are involved. If armed men are barging into sacred spaces they need to be able to triple, quadruple check they are performing what the warrant says and if not then nothing else they are doing shall be trusted either. Invading a home uninvited is a life and death matter and there is no room for policeman who make such glaring mistakes even if the natural untrained or undisciplined random person naturally might.
> giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
Are you seriously saying that with a straight face while (apparently) living in Germany of all places?
May I suggest picking up a history book or two?
They're just protecting the kids, at least to start with.
From what?
I truly believe unfettered access to endless scroll dopamine is bad for adults, but even more terrible for a developing mind. It reduces attention span, increases anxiety, etc. Pushing the onus on parents for healthy internet consumption is probably not effective because most families have both parents working jobs and can't be on top of their kids 24/7.
Now... how to effectively address this problem without introducing a dystopian surveillance state? I don't have a good answer.
Zero Knowledge Proofs, but the fact this isn't being implemented, despite various popular open source implementation existing [0], speaks volume.
[0] https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
what's the current solution that's impossible for kids to bypass with a borrowed or stolen id, say?
I don't see any proposals yet that will actually work for what they say they'll do.
You want a proposal? Make a kids-only set of sites. And then make hardware/software that can access only those sites. Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites. You can allow companies to register that they are one of these kid friendly sites with the additional regulation that would entail. Then make a kid having hardware that can access the normal Internet like having a beer in the US. Now perhaps you can find a hole in this, but it can be patched with technology and the right regulation.
That we aren't doing something like this gives the game away. How the EU is going about this means the point of all of this has nothing to do with children and everything to do with controlling political speech.
PS Yea, I know its a very vague suggestion, it can still be implemented
One issue that I see with this type of system is that it doesn't allow for parental/guardian oversight of what kids are doing or discussing.
Ever gone down the auto-suggestion rabbit hole on YouTube Kids? You start getting into weird and potentially disturbing territory much more quickly than you'd expect.
That's a good point. However, its possible to police YouTube Kids without destroying free speech. Policing the entire Internet and everyone else...not so much. That's the whole point of having the companies providing "kids" sites to register and have a specific set of regulations about the "kids" sites. Perhaps those regulations include parental controls.
You have to stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a public health official.
'Something impossible for kids to bypass' is not the goal. It's akin to evaluating a flu vaccine on the standard of zero breakthrough cases. Such a standard has no relevance on the efficacy of the vaccine.
Likewise for underage internet access. Proponents would be happily satisfied with 90% compliance. They really don't care that coverage isn't complete or circumvention is complete. Once you realize that, you can start constructing counterarguments that dismantle the claim that digital IDs would solve the problems they're supposed to.
Here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49080929
There is discussion about LLMs, models, CSAM, undressing people with AI, and posting those images to places.
No handy wavy stuff, makes this problem go away due to filtering at creation. That's because, open models are a thing. So you either ban all open models, or maybe make it a crime to publish uncensored models, or you punish what individuals do on the internet.
Slander and libel and defamation are a thing, and have been a thing forever, millennia. Suddenly, on the open and free internet, for barely an eyeblink, anyone could say anything with zero liability and responsibility.
Then, 2010s came. Then, doxing of people we didn't like, or didn't agree with, became OK. So suddenly, it was OK to "out" a person, but not to just force everyone to be de-anonymoized. In other words, unpopular opinions? Yeah, that's OK to remove the cloak.
And with AI, everyone and their dog will be able to render images of anyone they want naked. CSAM. Political lies, made up videos, slander, libel, literal wors in people's mouths, on and on.
What's my point?
Well, just as 2000 brought a new world to people, 2025 is doing the same.
This is only going to get worse. And I fully agree, the dangers for "control" are going to exist. But the dangers of people posting all of this stuff, has hit the point where a lot of people are uncomfortable with it. And if you think Grok creating CSAM is bad, then you must think anyone creating CSAM is bad. Or anything. So how to you prevent the harm?
Well really, you either heavily restrict software. Open LLMs, or?
You make people posting this stuff liable.
The world is at a fork. Everything will change. Because banning software requires immense control over hosting software, but so does deanonymizing the internet. And really, this is inline with how the political and societal landscape changes.
It's only been 20 years since a lot of people were on the Internet, and only 10 years since I'd label it 'mainstream'. As in, even grandma uses it. And so, now the laws are coming, as legislation and law and change takes time for politicians, and political bodies.
We're here. Right now. This is the moment.
So I 100% guarantee that absolutely nothing will stop the path to liability for slander, libel, and more that is coming. Nothing. Whatever it takes, you can be sure it will happen.
So how will it happen?
Well, by knowing who to sue.
Like it or not, that's the truth. And no, I don't like it myself.
I want the right to not be identified. I also want the right to SELF identify. I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability. I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify. The cost of running LLM botnets is going down. I cannot imagine how the next cycle of elections is going to be like on all countries. I understand the right to remain anonymous, that should remain, but that state should not be the default on these massively big platforms. Our brains and political systems are not designed for this. And no, "get people to get rid of their smartphone voluntarily" like I see on the comments is not going to happen.
> I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability.
It is trivial to demonstrate that this is incorrect (despite sounding plausible). There's plenty of incredibly toxic behavior to be found all over facebook.
Among other considerations it's worth noting that most of the usual social feedback mechanisms are missing from typical online interactions.
> The cost of running LLM botnets is going down.
Agreed that this is an existential threat to anonymous discourse as it is typically implemented.
> There's plenty of incredibly toxic behavior to be found all over facebook.
But is it comparable to the amount of toxic behavior on 4chan?
I'd wager the amount on FB is orders of magnitude _more_ than on 4chan. 4chan's average severity is likely higher, though. They're different problems, but saying that online toxicity only exists on anonymous sites is naive at best.
>I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify.
You can do that already, Facebook is pretty close to exactly what you're talking about. They do a lot of work to identify real people and de-prioritize spam/bots. You can configure your account to only be able to interact with real people if you want. Many people like anonymity though, it's important for speaking truth to power and discussing topics which are outside the Overton window.
There's a good reason that many of the United States' founding fathers used pseudonyms when writing. Anonymity and real freedom of speech are foundational to democracy. If you can put someone in jail for saying something that the government doesn't like, then the government will be able to steer discourse towards outcomes it deems acceptable, even if those outcomes subvert the will of the people.
There's no real need to have the government force all websites to always authenticate all humans. The only real argument for such a system is to move us toward dystopian authoritarianism.
Things are far more enjoyable as a teen when it s forbidden, remember the golden age of p2p!
Teens who want to see porn will be able to see porns, but they will learn somethings along the way to do so
This is caricatural of course, but it s just so dumb as law as enforcing age verification "anonymously" is just like a don quichotte battle at AI era
I often joke that every technical measure that prevents teens from watching porn is a way to make teens more tech-savvy.
Kids these days have it too easy, we need stronger protections or the next generation will make pathetic hackers.
> the next generation will make pathetic hackers.
"Hey ChatGPT Hacker Core Rizz Edition, can you hack this website for me?"
The physical world has age checks when kids attempt to enter a premises with dangerous or unsuitable content - eg bars, casinos, strip joints. These seem largely accepted as a good thing. Why do so many seem to feel that the same protections are so outrageous when applied in the virtual world? Honest question, I can see both sides.
When you are age-checked in real life, the bouncer glances at your ID, checks the date of birth, checks the photo and lets you through, having not remembered a shred of that information. You are just one in a crowd of a thousand. If you're old enough, they may even wave you through without looking at any real data.
When you're age-checked on the internet, a scan of your ID goes on the website, then is likely forwarded to a helpful third party business. It extracts every bit of data, analyzes your picture, then carefully saves and catalogues everything, and returns True to the website, which may have also stored their own copy of this data, depending on how the process is implemented. This data is now in their hands forever. If, at any point in the future, you access another age-gated website that uses the same third party business, now there's nothing stopping them from correlating that private browsing data. How juicy. Adtech will love that. As you keep handing out your ID left and right, every single bit you divulge is recorded somewhere, forever. And at the end of the day, this is just moving data around, so there's nothing preventing your government, or the host's government, or all governments from passing a law that asks for that data to be shared with them - just in case, you know. Now there's many copies of your exact identity floating around, just one data leak or legal request away from revealing everything you've ever done tied in a neat little package. Real life ID is limited by constraints of practicality and our physical world, digital ID is limited by nothing.
And this is the best-case scenario I'm describing here. Imagine if they ask us to show our identities publicly, not just to the corporate all-seeing-eyes. Everyone would become doxxable by default, their whole life exposed and searchable, the mere idea of having secrets would be wiped away, communities made for marginalized or at-risk people would all fall silent.
Yes, there are ideas about zero-knowledge proofs and legislation about data privacy and whatever else. But these don't benefit either corporations or governments, and the average Joe doesn't care about putting his real name on everything, so we can pretty safely assume that this won't happen.
We don't talk about age verification like in a bar. We talk about age verification like in the internet, where every of your step generates data. So you don't verify your age, you verify your identity. It's like you step in a bar and someone writes down every word you say, every drink you order and every person or place you look at. And then he places your complete name and address on it and stores it in his closet to pull it out when he needs it.
Would you really enter a bar, casino or strip club when it would look like this?
We don't talk about children, we talk about everyone here.
This initiative has the ID "ECI(2026)000011". If I understand this correctly, that means there have only been eleven citizen initiatives this year? Is that system working as designed, because that's a shockingly low number.
Edit: the initiatives themselves also have shockingly low numbers of signatures. A few thousand. A million are required for the EC to take notice. This system seems a bit shitty. But maybe I'm misunderstanding it.
I don't think that's too surprising, as even if you get 1 million of signatures the only thing you will get is "response from Commission". So they can reply with legalese for "get bent" and there goes your million signatures.
I'm glad they mention privacy preserving and being voluntary. It's possible to make digital ID that allows selectively revealing attributes without identity, and that could solve problems like bots, socketpuppets, etc along with reasonable age-gating. It could be an ideal internet if it's properly applied. The problem is it's difficult to verify all the promises are being kept, and if they're not it instantly becomes a true dystopia. And sites could use it in inappropriate ways resulting in discrimination.
So if i can not circumvent the surveilance- can i pack my wanted unsurveiled stuff into harmless data and send them- basically use the surveiled Internet as a UDP layer - over which my hidden unsurveiled internet goes via TCP?
You mean a VPN?
Hopefully this fares better than Stop Killing Games.
SKG has fared pretty well, what do you mean?
They just had a pretty major setback in court.
Can you be more specific? The only related court cases I'm aware of are U.S. The Crew lawsuit which seems to have reached settlement recently and the French case regarding which I haven't seen any updates since it's filing.
https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/stop-killing-games-fails-to-s...
That's legalization setback, not court setback.
They... didn't? They got a petition response from the EU that was more positive than they had expected, and a response from the commission is not court: the response phrasing literally leaves the door open.
Heck, the parallel movement in the US even had a major legislative victory in California, so... what are we talking about?
They’re still around so I don’t see why having a legal setback is the same thing as going poorly. They are attempting their mission again with new bills in US and EU.
I have a hard time figuring out whether most of the comments are genuine or not.
Are you guys really in favor of giving governments and police corps more control and more power so that you are observed, monitored, restricted because "the internet is dead", "think of the children" and "you need to know who to sue"?
You guys are joking, right? Right?
am i alone in wanting the internet to be killed? we’d all be better off if everyone wasn’t terminally online
I think the scenario posited here is the worse possible one where we are still chronically online but on a dead internet while being fully and relentless surveilled.
The internet of the future is an IQ test. Are you smart enough to get in, do your work in a focused manner, and get out so that you live your life? Many, many people will fail this test.
Counterpoint: meatspace is awful unless you're a normie. Christ, the day I got out of my small town and into a major city university dorm room with fast Internet was the day my life opened up. I found people with my interests. Etc.
"The Internet sucks. Get offline," is the battle cry of someone who likes Marvel movies and the book that Target has at the checkout line, or lives in one of about five cities in the USA.
Oof. You're missing out if you think meatspace is limited to target and big American cities. I agree that the web makes it easy(er) to connect with others in niche interests, but in-person experiences can be so diverse, vibrant, stimulating that I understand the simmering tug some have toward wanting the internet to become unusable. I agree with sibling that a "healed" internet, while very optimistic, is the ideal case.
Sincerely, your fellow terminally online HN commenter.
> You're missing out if you think meatspace is limited to target and big American cities.
The joke about middle-of-nowhere towns is that the only thing for teens to do in meatspace is to go to the Walmart. Because there's nothing else to do.
Walmart?! Do you think we had a mall?! The only thing we had to do was drinking beer and smoking weed.
Are you old enough to remember the time where the internet doesn't existed? Sounds like not.
I hope they kill the internet. Mandatory ID scans might be the last push I need to stop wasting my time on Reddit.
Social media in it's current form is already dying to the explosion in synthetic interaction but the internet could survive and reshape itself.
I'd rather have the internet healed
Ironic that you can't make a point without communicating in meaningless buzzwords and memes.
When people say things like this, they mean the good parts of the internet, e.g. real people who are able to be honest because a pseudonym allows them to say things they would be punished by evildoers for saying if the evildoers could identify them. Taking that away doesn't get you out of the engagement-optimized ad funnel, it just makes that be the only thing left.
Having a digital ID does not obviate that (in principle), thanks to zero-knowledge schemes.
To my understanding then, the issue is that the EU's implementation only has a ZK-based solution in the plans so far.
But then this initiative says "No Digital ID", not "No Auto-Deanonymizable Digital ID", so...
You are not.
The Internet is fine and the bad parts will heal or remove themselves if we remove the actual bad thing: smart phones. The Internet is not supposed to follow you around hence the term "In Real Life" or "meatspace". If you want to be "terminally online" you need to sit your ass down in front of a computer for hours.
> if we remove the actual bad thing: smart phones.
That's a tall order, although there are plenty of reports of younger people switching to "dumb phones." I've switched to one myself. But how could you possibly stop it? They are terrible -- now that I don't have one anymore it's insane how many people are constantly staring at their phones, walking on the sidewalk, crossing the street, etc. It's really depressing.
But ya, at this point I don't care if parts of the internet are fine and if I had the power to burn it all down, I would.
So if i understand correctly, there's no webpage to sign this initiative yet?
You need to first provide a passport image + 5 angled selfies + bank statement + proof of employment to the Peoples Democratic European Union before you can sign.
The name could also be:
"Stop overcontrolling and overregulating every aspect of our lives!"
Stop letting regular people know they are engaging with bots
Only massive data gatherers should be able to track and know everything about people
Wanna be rich? Make a social media company that somehow only allows real people to post. You crack that one, fame and fortune await you...
The internet's (at least as we knew it) days were numbered as soon as the dot com bubble happened. It changed from a thing to share info to a thing to make money. It's irrecoverably corrupted and this blatant overreach for everyone's PII is just a symptom.
The Internet is already dead.
I'm reasonably confident that in the relatively near future, the Internet will be so overrun with bots and other worthless "content" that people will flock to platforms that confirm IRL identity.
Yeah I've been wanting ID for years. Because i neighbor Russia and their propaganda game is top notch. One person one account.
Think what that would mean for your average person in a country that didn't like their government...for instance in Russia. You clearly haven't thought through the consequences of your suggestion.
This isnt legislation for Russia
You assume you will always like and agree with your current government. And there are European countries who already jail people for political speech the government doesn't like.
You don't need IRL identity. You just need invite-only. Discord is great for this. I've run so many fandom events over Discord, and we never have a problem with bots, and it's very fun creating fanfiction, fanart, calendars, zines, and talking about the other aspects of our lives every day.
You don’t need IRL identity, you just need persistent reputation. That reputation can be attached to a pseudonymous identity or an IRL one. But the design of most modern social media is to detach the “content” from the context of the author. The feeds you subscribe to are funnels that channel atomized bits of content to you. Some of it may be authored by them, but it’s the platform that intermediates your relationship to that content more than the creator. The creator is subordinated to it.
A different design logic, and the logic of the blogosphere that preceded it, much more tightly prioritized following a blogger or poster and interpreting everything you see in light of who was posting it. The trust is placed in the account you follow.
We've moved "identity" to a few large monopolists. Who lack all incentive to properly "enforce" it. And whose interest are perpendicular to people owning their identities (being able to take them elsewhere).
"Persistent" reputation won't change that. Because on the internet nothing is persistent, without a central party enforcing it to be so. And as said above, the ones in charge of it now, don't want to enforce it really. You don't own your domain, you don't own your IP, you don't own your feeds, "content" etc. The infrastructure that routes people to your correct "reputation", isn't yours, it's controlled and owned by Big Tech, governments, and some smaller companies. Your feed can be taken offline or away from you in a whim. Access to your blog isn't yours. Not even if you host it on a rasberry-pi in your cupboard.
Aside from maybe some blockchain shenanigans, that is. Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum are the only decentralized "pseudonymous" identity providers that could step into this, but both are ridiculously costly and complex. And wholly unsuited to route content. Systems designed for this, like Tor, aren't really up to the task either. Just look at how insanely hard it is for "Content" that governments oppose, to remain online (e.g. on the tor network). Possible, but so complex, so fragile, that it's not a practical system to use en masse. Yet it's the only working system that comes closest to really owning content in the broad sense.
So it makes perfect sense to turn to the systems that have done this "persistent reputation", aka "identity" for centuries now: Governments. Compared to Big Tech, they're more decentralized - there are far more governments worldwide "doing identities" than there are FAANG corporations. Hell, even within the US or within my country alone, there are more. Compared with all other systems, we can control them, push them into a direction we want them to go - democracy. Far from perfect. Bad even. But the least worst way to have some "persistent identity" we can get. Unfortunately.
You’re trying to engineer a social interaction. Stop that!
People remembering your handle is persistent, and people remembering if they had good or annoying interactions with you is persistent reputation that exists in the minds and interactions between different people. These are things people naturally do. If people don’t recognize your name and see it come in a trusted spot they just don’t trust you.
How tech breaks this is deprioritizes the people in the interactions. Instead of sending messages you use a “like” button to be intelligible to the platform. You don’t see the people putting stuff on your feed, it gets fed to a timeline that cuts it off from all context and atomizes it for your consumption. It’s the UI/UX that drives this. Even compare Reddit and HN with old forums. On forums like 25% of every post is just static bits of self-expression. There’s a PFP, the username is bigger, there’s often a big signature block. All of this makes the peoples’ posts feel like a person talking to you rather than text blocks that happen to have a tiny username and timestamp on it.
My point is that you don't own your handle. Therefore you aren't your handle.
Edit: to clarify: You aren't your handle, because it can be taken away from you, can be injected, blocked, overridden, etc.
My technical rambling then went on about how or when we can make this "handle" decentralized so it cannot be taken away from you. Hard. As proven in practice. Almost impossible.
My name is maintained by a government. It is a "handle" that could be taken away too, but is governed in lots of rules, systems and regulations. My face (an extension of my DNA, I guess) is decentralized and owned by me: its the only handle that afaik no one can take from me.
So in social interactions, you're right: reputation, bound to "me", my face, my DNA is all that matters. But online we don't have this. The closest we can probably get is "my name", controlled by governments.
> My point is that you don't own your handle. Therefore you aren't your handle.
This is a good point. I wrote a self-deprecating post to Reddit one time that got flagged by AI or someone who isn't a native English speaker as a "threat of violence." This is almost word for word the exchange that triggered it:
Me: [some in-depth discussion of electrical wiring in a house]
Other person: Wow, thank you so much! I would hire you to fix my wiring!
Me: haha oh I'd probably find some other way to burn your house down
The final line was meant to be a humble way of dismissing the compliment by playing down my expertise. But someone with the power to ban accounts parsed this as "I am going to commit arson."
And so I lost the ability to DM any of my friends. My entire reputation was gone. This was a nearly 20yo Reddit account.
And I can't make a new account and tell people "this used to be me" because then Reddit bans your new account because it's against the rules to create a new account if you've been banned.
Yes, I've created other accounts since then. But I can't ever link them to my old one because Reddit will just ban the new ones. (I tried this, and that's exactly what happened.)
I can't even participate on the same subreddits because there's some algo that recognizes if two accounts have similar subscription habits and does some kind of analysis to guess at if it's a person evading a ban.
I was shocked at first (I was in the mid of organizing an event using Reddit in part for communications, and had to rely on an IRL friend who was helping rn it to speak for me), and then angry, and then just sad.
It's one reason I've begun using one moniker everywhere, and I own that domain name as well. It's the closest I can get to fully owning my handle.
I'm "berkes" almost everywhere. And my domain is my handle as well: berk.es.
So I do the same as you. But I am quite sure e.g. The Great Musk In All His Wisdom will one day either find me annoying and hand over the now discontinued x.com/berkes to someone who agrees better whith His views. Or decides his politics are better served by raising accounts from the deaths and making some AI voice act like me, that spew political messages.
I own "berkes" about everywhere. But nowhere do I really own it. Not even the domain name. The only handle I truly own is some bc1q....... address. One that has -by design- no reputation and one that's impossible to write in pen on the back of a beermat after a nice discussion in a bar.
IMO that is the problem that botspams and focus on IRL identity aims to "solve". Money can't buy competency, therefore popularity, and that undermines economic influence one may have, which is problematic to some.
I think you make a good point and it is well taken. You could be right.
But I still believe that people will care about connecting with an actual person in meatspace. I just can't picture any other result except for complete and total burnout with the fakeness of the web.
I think it's a missed opportunity to not have called it "Stop spying on every EU citizen online". It would make for great headlines and might finally wake people up when they see that the EU has rejected a proposal called that.
"Stop killing the internet" unfortunately means nothing at all to the layman, they will still be using it pretty much exactly as they were before, and governments will just claim "See, internet is still working".
You may be overthinking this. It is privacy that means little to the regular joe. The internet they use every day and it being changed beyond recognition is much more tangible than privacy being curtailed just a little bit more.
And these authoritarian politicians will destroy the internet with these actions. Maybe they will even change society as we know it, and not for the better.
The problem is thinking such initiatives will achieve anything in a bureaucratic system devoid of honest debate and actual democracy.
These citizen's initiatives must at least be tried but simultaneously we must create a new internet forever out of politician reach.
Agreed.
I think it's time that "please let 1800 analytics firms monitor your every browsing habit in exchange for this content" was seen in the same light as "please let 1800 private foreign espionage and propaganda agencies spy on you".
Yes, absolutely...people drastically underestimate how much political propaganda on social media is from targeted foreign operations. Getting children and those propaganda operations off "adult"/anonymous social media would be so beneficial to all of society. The EU is actively doing something else though...I doubt the propaganda operations would even be slowed down by the EU's efforts.
"Stop enabling pedophiles in government"
And keep pushing this until it passes. Keep repeating like they do chat control.
Great point. Reminds me of Biden’s constant whisper-scream “the future of democracy is at stake!”
Like, yeah, it was an accurate statement, but total shit if your goal is to get people up off the couch and into voting booth. Way too abstract and high-minded
How are we on the tech and protocols side of having a truly distributed worldwide mesh-net?
i.e. drone swarms replacing ISPs?
It's been working for decades. But nobody uses it except child pornographers. Freenet.
>The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age
NO. It really shouldn't. I will not comply. Porn sites can require this shit, but not the rest of the internet. Social media, dating websites, that's up to the users. If kids are on there, that's on the parents. Do your job, be the parent. I'm not going to let lazy good for nothing parents ruin the internet for everyone else.
We can talk, talk, and governments will still move forward. Or we can build an alternative that shows it's possible to get age verification while maintaining privacy.
There is a real way out of it -- the governments can have their cake and eat it too. I published several academic papers to prove it, and I'm open to building and deploying it. Would anyone want to work on this together:
https://magarshak.com/papers.html
I haven't considered this before with SKG, but if this progresses, it means the EU parliament may choose to take action based on an initiative that potentially only a vocal minority supports [0], while coming across as if they were simply following the will of the people.
Not sure how I feel about that, sounds kind of problematic in retrospect. Especially since there's no mechanism for triggering EU-wide referendums to help this AFAIK.
[0] population of the EU: 452 million, unique signatures required for this: 1 million
It would be nice to have a digital referendum on this topic. I could think of some tech that makes it happen, something like a digital ID maybe?
I think if it we want to stop killing the internet, the lack of regulation of AI/bot companies is the biggest problem right now.
A few things you can legally do online without ID or age verification in the US
1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!)
2) Buy "CBD" by the pound
3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it.
4) Order and have delivered wine
But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.
Usually the delivery person asks for ID when delivering the wine?
They absolutely don't. They ask for your date of birth to fill it on their app and that's it.
In most US states, they require the delivery driver to recheck the ID in person. Depends on the state though.
Not for wine, not usually. Wine can be mail ordered, the carrier has no idea what it even is. They might require signature on delivey, but anyone who's dealt with UPS and fedex know they will essentially never look at ID. In high school I used to order wine and they had me sign but I was under 18, the box was non-descript and the delivery man had no idea what it was so a kid signing for it made no difference. It's different than beer or liquor sales where it's under the more recent COVID era exceptions that require checking ID and the delivery person actually knows what it is.
The mail order wine stuff is way older and under way different rules than most other alcohol delivery services.
As I said, it depends on the state. I've had to sign for wine before.
Did you order it under mail order delivery rules or under alcohol retailer rules? They're quite different. If the person you bought it from offered beer and alcohol as well, you were probably ordering under the retailer paradigm which requires an ID check. If you ordered it straight from a wine producer or exclusive wine seller then it was probably under the mail order framework. The point isn't that all wine purchases aren't ID'd, it's that there is a framework under which you can legally order wine online without an ID check happening -- if you pursue the alcohol retailer delivery rather than wine mail order route you might not be able to do that though.
Not in all states. In my home state of Pennsylvania, it's only legal to have alcohol delivered by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. It is not legal to order directly from producers.
The laws do indeed vary by state.
> it's only legal to have alcohol delivered by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. It is not legal to order directly from producers.
You are full of shit. Opinion safely discarded.
https://www.pa.gov/agencies/lcb/shop-wine-spirits/direct-win...
>The laws do indeed vary by state.
I am not disputing that. I am disputing that "most US states, they require the delivery driver to recheck the ID in person" (the original comment I was replying to). "UPS or fedex has to check" is meaningless since they have no idea what it is and essentially no historical nor practical route to prosecution of a common-carrier deliveryman who has no idea what is in the package and no mens rea for wittingly transmitting alcohol to a minor. The states that require adult signature on common carrier delivery essentially have zero legally binding requirement as the deliveryman in most states can't be successfully prosecuted unless there is mens rea that they had prior knowledge the non-descript package was alcohol and the economics of common carrier delivery practically guarantee they will not check IDs when requested to. Thus the "requirement to check at delivery" for mail order wine is actually just a weakest of suggestions with a wink and a nod with no teeth.
For the purpose of the argument, they don't.
#1 isn't entirely true. It's a soft-gate but you are legally required to verify age on your site before completing the purchase (I run a boutique cigar brand [1]).
[1] https://philosophercigars.com
Is teens ordering wine a big issue in the US? Bigger than social media?
Of course not. But literally any excuse that comes to hand will be deployed if it helps the tech industry continue to avoid meaningful consequences. The same handful of companies that have engineered a global surveillance suite that rivals the most tyrannical sovereign governments wildest dreams (and can trivially detect the approximate age of a user) will without a shred of irony deploy legions of paid influencers and other astroturf to decry age verification as an assault on privacy.
But it is an assault on privacy. If "protecting kids" was the goal here they'd push for regulation that forces websites to return standardized metadata that then gets interpreted by the user agent which can be configured by the parent.
Nah, that's a perfectly fine technical solution. Powers that be don't think like that. They understand pulling someone over to check their license, so something like that will do.
sigh If data brokerages, Meta, Google, and Palantir are all staring at you how is it possible to claim privacy is even possible? Like, you have to have a thing before it's possible to assault it.
Even for a "Citizens' Initiative", this stuff is remarkably tone-deaf. "No Digital ID" ignores the very-real need for people to prove their identity to government(-ish) entities online, and to do so in a reliable, cheap and convenient way. Sure, you do not want that ID to become mandatory for publishing or existing on the Internet in general, but that's a separate discussion: demand sufficient protection for anonymous/pseudonymous posts instead, which is absolutely something that needs to be codified as part of basic human rights.
"No age verification" is even deader-on-arrival. Parents are literally screaming at politicians to protect "the children" (as always), but pretty much everything that has been tried so far to silence those screams has failed (remember PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection: that was the last serious contender, and it has been dead for, like, 20 years). Again: demand a way to implement this securely and anonymously, don't take an untenable abolitionist stance or resort to hand-waving in the vague general direction of "parental responsibility": that has been tried, and it's not working anymore.
And, please, stop vilifying the EU in these matters. The UK left the EU, ostensibly so they could make "more sensible laws" in, specifically, respects like these, and they're now leading the assault on basic freedoms with even more fervor. And no, that's not just big-bad-Starmer's fault: it's a preview of what you have to argue against and propose a compromise for instead.
not all parents are screaming this. Only the parents who refuse to parent their children, and conveniently scapegoat society for their parental failings
We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
You could make same exact argument regarding kids health, alcohol abuse, nicotine abuse, all types of addictions, age of consent, and so on.
You can't just have all the safeguards dropped because you think you're doing a good job. Or, even worse, you have no kids and it's your virtues merely projecting.
> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
From both someone involved in raising kids as well as someone who knows a lot of teachers: none of the involved parties want that. Schools are at best for teaching, but never for raising.
I respectfully disagree. Yes, parents should raise their children as in be present in their lives and help them grow and shape themselves. However, schools with the rules, social engagements, and learning is also a form of raising. Teachers, especially in elementary school, are extremely influential for young kids. How teachers behave when somebody is bullied, how they handle questions, basically how they handle anything, forms the minds of young children.
Is it the sole responsibility of a school to ensure well raised (for whichever specific definition of “well”) children? No. However, they are a large factor in the raising of children.
School was an escape from my home life, but it could never fix my home life. As a child who had no ability to determine what constituted "normal" in order to escape my situation, the only real solution for my home life was for me to be born to different parents. I doubt any amount of legislation would have accomplished that.
That's why I think it was a huge mistake to make teachers mandatory reporters. The idea was that they'd report people neglecting or abusing their children, but what happened is the more egregious cases usually learned to just do a half-ass "home schooling" instead so the child never sees a mandatory reporter and then situation is even worse because now the kid has no escape, no access to doctors, etc.
I feel like you must have a very restrictive definition of what constitutes “raising” kids if we’re omitting the place where they spend the majority of their waking hours and the people most of their social universe is based in.
We’ve had a live experiment with this during COVID and it’s pretty clear that kids raised solely at home by their parents fared way worse. Not just on academic metrics, but basic conflict resolution or social skills.
This is one of those comments where I get your point, but have a couple of big "uhm actually"s :point-up: :nerd-face:
I wouldn't think that COVID is a good indicator as this was in no way typical home-schooling. The vast majority of kids were going to school "online," and not schooled by their parents. They were also largely confined indoors with their families all day and all evening.
I'm having trouble making my other point without slipping deep into trying to define "raising," so I'm just going to hit "reply" here.
Raising almost all children in these government socialist barracks is so dystopian. What you call "worse" conflict resolution and social skills I call superior confidence and autonomy. People today are oversocialized.
Yes, Finn's and Swedes are the modern day clusterfu*ks of societies /s
It is a parenting issue.
Don't let kids have an internet-connected phone, the same way they can't have a bottle of wine.
If they really need such device make sure that device is locked to a small list of app/contacts possible.
There's no need to lock down the rest of the internet because the responsible person of such kid can't tolerate their complaints. It is a parenting issue.
You totally ignored the point OP was making! Even if it is a parenting issue, simply declaring that will not make parents parent better. It's the same reason why we ban children from drinking wine, because parents cannot be relied upon here.
Unless your point was that we should legally ban kids from handling phones, which I think is too extreme.
But that is my point.
Chase the responsible adult if you see a kid with an overpowered phone, much like you would if you found the same kid with a bottle of wine.
And granted, we don't have locked-enough phone in market yet, but that's a solvable problem if we were to create that market.
There is also the influence of the church.
I have seen religious parents been vocally opposed to their children seeing or even discussing anything related to sexuality.
An example from the past:
"The National Legion of Decency, also known as the Catholic Legion of Decency, was an American Catholic group founded in 1934 by the Archbishop of Cincinnati, John T. McNicholas, as an organization dedicated to identifying objectionable content in motion pictures on behalf of Catholic audiences."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Decency
https://www.archbalt.org/catholicism-influenced-moviemaking-...
You have to appreciate the level of audacity required for a catholic organization to claim they are protecting children from harms regarding sexuality.
Just put your kids in a bubble so not a single adult is the slightest bit inconvenienced by having to exercise any social responsibility for their well being. Easy.
> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
"It takes a village to raise a child." Except these same parents who won't take care of their kids are also the very first who go all "How dare you speak to my child like that! I'm going to have you fired!"
If your way of talking to kids gets you fired, it was atrocious in the first place. "It takes a village to raise a child." is not about carte blanche to abuse any kid that you encounter.
The saying is about kids watching and learning from their environment - from how adults act. If you set up to be jerk or take advantage of random kids that happen to be around, you are teaching them to take advantage of people. And no amount of yelling "their parents are responsible because they did not stopped me" is going to change that.
"If your way of talking to kids gets you fired, it was atrocious in the first place."
I'm guessing you don't have kids.
So they should be raised by the state just in case? I feel like Ive read this story somewhere...
Parents should be imprisoned if they give children access to the internet. We have to make parents criminally liable. Without a change in incentives, we cannot expect behavior to change. Until then 'parents need to parent' is a slogan and not a solution.
I'm a parent and would rather ban age verification. So it's certainly not everyone...
Right. Care for your children includes the responsibility to keep the society they're eventually going to participate in, free and open.
Loving your children means fighting censorship, not promoting it.
There are also fascists screaming at the government to do other wildly illegal stuff. The lousy parents begging the government to "tread on me" would get wildly better results by spending less time trying to create an authoritarian state and more time with their kids they claim to care so much about.
They're children. They have the internet access you give them. This isn't some unsolveable problem that needs government intervention, my parents were setting up filters so long ago that they're grandparents now.
I suggest that you don't make the filters to hard to bypass (I would do DNS in both a DNS server and /etc/hosts, along with a browser extension), to encourage them to learn about technology. (although that might stop working due to Ai chatbots)
> my parents were setting up filters
Ah, OK, so you admit a problem exists. That's step one...
And the solution already exists, one that doesn't empower the government to do some truly heinous shit.
Every power you grant the government is another knife they'll eventually stab you in the back with. Maybe you like your current government, but what about the next one, and the one after that?
Instead, just use the tools you already have access to. I was not opposed when California mandated that applications add parental controls, that's fine. If parents want to restrict their children's internet access, there's a continium there ranging from "prudent parenting" to "child abuse", but that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis. I am, however, rabidly against the state requiring you to dox yourself every time you log into a website, because inconceivably lazy parents can't figure out how to use the parental tools that they already have.
Parenting controls are shit on the end device side. It's not working, it's not even trying to. Nobody would need this blanket approach if parenting controls actually worked.
Back when smoking was more normal we basically did leave it up to Big Tobacco to determine how best to tackle underage smoking and they would literally say insane things like “Oh course we’re not targeting elementary school kids! We’re not monsters! Our advertising doesn’t hit them until they’re in 8th grade at least!”
Expecting platform monopolists and dopamine dealers to design for this is folly. They are wired to try to normalize an unhealthy level of dependence on them. Their business model is addiction.
One hour old account advocating for digital identity? And a few other posts here from other accounts doing the same? Is this a psyop?
>Ah, OK, so you admit a problem exists. That's step one...
Okay but for your position to be tenable you have to then go to step 2, which is some parents are incompetent at doing this, and step 3, which is that, nevertheless, their children, who are randomized copies of them genetically, still somehow need and benefit from the filters that their parents can't or won't apply. Then you get to step 4, which is that all of the competent people must suffer so those children can get it from a heavy handed government solution. I don't see how you jointly accept all these steps; it means you want to have a tyranny of the incompetent over the competent. You must jointly assert that they are dumb while placing them up and over the not dumb. That's full on crab-bucket, dysgenics by force ideology.
You do realize that you can just require auths for the kids and not the adults right? It requires a regulatory and hardware solution but its very possible.
PS Also, no solution would ever be perfect. Walls don't deny access, they change traffic patterns. So if it works 99% of the time, its good enough.
Because this is for stupid people, it will be done in a stupid way. They aren't interested in cash bought anonymous auth tokens that require you to be over 18 to the store clerk or whatever. In part this is stupidity, in part this panic is also about "pedophilia" so they want to make sure whoever is talking to their daughter who is using a parent authenticated tiktok account gets arrested promptly because he showed his passport as opposed to being there with an untraceable anonymous auth token he bought for $1.99 at a random convenience store.
You don't allow adults on the kids sites. So your theoretical pedo would have to provide ID to get the "kids" hardware. And the "kids" hardware can't go on the normal/adult/anonymous Internet. Done...
For the EU, this has nothing to do with kids.
This would require hardware manufacturing. Seems expensive. Locking down hardware is also something I don't want the government getting into. What about poor young suzie who got hit on by a creepy 30 year old briefly after booting linux on an old laptop? Now we have to make everything secure at the firmware level for the "children" etc
Only the "kids" hardware needs this. The adult/anonymous Internet doesn't. That's the whole point.
How will you stop 15 year olds from getting non-kids hardware?
>securely and anonymously
Not possible. Why do advocates of age verification bring this argument up again and again? It is not possible.
They don’t seem to oppose any of that if you read the intro
> We call on the European Commission to propose legislation ensuring that digital identity and age-assurance systems used to access online services in the Union remain voluntary, privacy-preserving and non-discriminatory. Citizens must not be forced to identify themselves to access lawful online content or services unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law. The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age, data minimisation, selective disclosure, open-source implementation, independent security audits, prohibition of cross-service tracking by relying parties, and equivalent alternatives for citizens who do not use a digital wallet.
It has been quite a slippery slope. Services that used to allow password auth have retired them in favour of bank detail login. I can kind of get it, since it's offloading support to the banks, but it's also annoying since the bank logins themselves are a pain to setup, maintain and use (mobile app only).
It would be nice to have some good standard that is less invasive.
At least in Sweden it is because it is a pain to have both bank id and passwords because by contract it is forbidden to allow a user that previous used bankid to ever use password again.
Are you seriously asking to read more than the title from an account created less than 30 minutes ago?
My apologies for joining this community. Do you have any more valuable tips, other than "get lost newbie"?
Welcome! I would recommend to read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And don’t pay attention to downvotes, that’s part of the game, it’s nothing against you, just accept that sometimes you lose karma :) in some way it’s a good exercise for the ego
While that's fair, would be kinda nice if the title was consistent with the content, instead of being, say, "reach optimized" (populist), wouldn't it?
The intro indeed doesn't sound too bad, but if you read into the underlying demands, the title is actually quite representative of what's going on here.
Specifically, the requirement to provide non-digital alternatives as well as control over relying parties (i.e. consumers of the 'digital ID' and/or 'age verification' APIs) makes all of this a non-starter.
I mean: non-digital alternatives to digital IDs? I guess that means that nobody should be forced to get a digital ID for access to essential government(-ish) services (like banking), and that's a valid point, but in the context of "stop killing the Internet" just obfuscates things.
And control over RPs beyond GDPR is just pushing it, again, quite on purpose.
As far as I know the only thing that influences change is money. What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things? All of my ideas would be very low traction but there are clever people here on HN that I am sure could come up with a few better ideas.
One of my (probably dumb) ideas is:
- Create a legal presence in a country that does not require being dystopian, relaxed business laws, less regulation, lower taxes, move most of the corporate side of the business there. Take the tax revenue with you. It does not have to be all at once. Make the move a slow boil so they don't see it until it's too late.
Which countries, provinces, regions, states have the least regulation, least dystopian behavior and the least taxes? There has to be a incentive for business leaders and board members to move things around. Bonus if the saved money pays for a Gulfstream G650 ER or two.
> What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things?
Right now the most important thing to inhibiting a dystopia is to break the lock Apple and Google have on approval of mobile code, because it gets used as a fulcrum by authoritarians. Want to ban VPNs? Make the app stores do it. Censor social media? Have them ban every social media app that doesn't censor. Want to track everyone everywhere? Make the phone provide sites and apps with a persistent cross-service tracking ID.
Whereas if ordinary people had devices that worked like PCs traditionally have, banning a VPN from the Microsoft store doesn't prevent you from installing one directly from the developer etc.
And getting this to be possible could be done by any sufficiently large market. If a sufficiently large market e.g. bans attestation and enforces antitrust, it allows an open platform to develop in that country by starting with compatibility with the apps of existing platforms, and then that platform can expand into other markets. Or you can get an iPhone there that you can install a VPN on and Apple can't prevent it, and then those iPhones can be exported into authoritarian countries.
And if you want a financial incentive for this, how about every country outside the US not wanting their local businesses paying the 30% tax to a foreign monopolist?
> As far as I know the only thing that influences change is money.
You are incorrect. The NIMBY movement has been extraordinarily successful despite severe opposition from moneyed interests. Bloomberg lost embarrassingly despite setting records for campaign spending. There are countless similar examples.
The NIMBY movement is moneyed interests. The owners of existing real estate zoned for high density don't want more of it because increased supply lowers prices. The people in an affluent suburb don't want affordable condos anywhere in their school district. This comes at the expense of the poor who then pay higher rents.
They control the last mile of the Internet so it would require satellite networking run by another country to cut them out like this.
"I Remember Babylon" by Arthur C. Clarke.
Written in 1960, but very prescient.
If only there was some free speech absolutist who had their very own satellite Internet company. I must be forgetting someone...
PS The dishes are hard (but not impossible) to hide.
Another thing that influences change reliably is a good old (threat of) violence.
I would rather not incite violence on this platform. That just gets a bunch of people put in a cage limiting their career options and potentially "justifies" even greater dystopian actions.
Who are we threatening today?
UA spies on Europeans, and vice versa. Then they share, it's not spying on your citizens, it's called 'intelligence sharing'.
This is bad but it's no reason to adapt a defeatist attitude.
What is UA?
Perhaps they meant United Artists, an evil syndicate hell bent on world domination and film distribution.
United America?
that ended in the 80s
This is funny coming from the EU who brought us cookie banners.
The EU didn't bring us cookie banners, tech companies performing malicious compliance with the EU mandates did
Even EU institutions use cookie banners. Also, if it was just malicious compliance, there would have been years of time to fix the regulations so that such shenaigans would not fly.
I think the problem is that GDPR focuses on consent more than would be prudent. Regulation is usually introduced when some actions are not appropriate even when there was consent. For example, one is not allowed to sell spoiled food, no matter how clear warnings they gave to the customers.