Do Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet? (404media.co) 159
404 Media claims to have identified "the fundamental flaw with the age verification bills and laws" that have already passed in eight state legislatures (with two more taking effect in July): "the delusional, unfounded belief that putting hurdles between people and pornography is going to actually prevent them from viewing porn."
They argue that age verification laws "drag us back to the dark ages of the internet." Slashdot reader samleecole shared this excerpt: What will happen, and is already happening, is that people — including minors — will go to unmoderated, actively harmful alternatives that don't require handing over a government-issued ID to see people have sex. Meanwhile, performers and companies that are trying to do the right thing will suffer....
The legislators passing these bills are doing so under the guise of protecting children, but what's actually happening is a widespread rewiring of the scaffolding of the internet. They ignore long-established legal precedent that has said for years that age verification is unconstitutional, eventually and inevitably reducing everything we see online without impossible privacy hurdles and compromises to that which is not "harmful to minors." The people who live in these states, including the minors the law is allegedly trying to protect, are worse off because of it. So is the rest of the internet.
Yet new legislation is advancing in Kentucky and Nebraska, while the state of Kansas just passed a law which even requires age-verification for viewing "acts of homosexuality," according to a report: Websites can be fined up to $10,000 for each instance a minor accesses their content, and parents are allowed to sue for damages of at least $50,000. This means that the state can "require age verification to access LGBTQ content," according to attorney Alejandra Caraballo, who said on Threads that "Kansas residents may soon need their state IDs" to access material that simply "depicts LGBTQ people."
One newspaper opinion piece argues there's an easier solution: don't buy your children a smartphone: Or we could purchase any of the various software packages that block social media and obscene content from their devices. Or we could allow them to use social media, but limit their screen time. Or we could educate them about the issues that social media causes and simply trust them to make good choices. All of these options would have been denied to us if we lived in a state that passed a strict age verification law. Not only do age verification laws reduce parental freedom, but they also create myriad privacy risks. Requiring platforms to collect government IDs and face scans opens the door to potential exploitation by hackers and enemy governments. The very information intended to protect children could end up in the wrong hands, compromising the privacy and security of millions of users...
Ultimately, age verification laws are a misguided attempt to address the complex issue of underage social media use. Instead of placing undue burdens on users and limiting parental liberty, lawmakers should look for alternative strategies that respect privacy rights while promoting online safety.
This week a trade association for the adult entertainment industry announced plans to petition America's Supreme Court to intervene.
They argue that age verification laws "drag us back to the dark ages of the internet." Slashdot reader samleecole shared this excerpt: What will happen, and is already happening, is that people — including minors — will go to unmoderated, actively harmful alternatives that don't require handing over a government-issued ID to see people have sex. Meanwhile, performers and companies that are trying to do the right thing will suffer....
The legislators passing these bills are doing so under the guise of protecting children, but what's actually happening is a widespread rewiring of the scaffolding of the internet. They ignore long-established legal precedent that has said for years that age verification is unconstitutional, eventually and inevitably reducing everything we see online without impossible privacy hurdles and compromises to that which is not "harmful to minors." The people who live in these states, including the minors the law is allegedly trying to protect, are worse off because of it. So is the rest of the internet.
Yet new legislation is advancing in Kentucky and Nebraska, while the state of Kansas just passed a law which even requires age-verification for viewing "acts of homosexuality," according to a report: Websites can be fined up to $10,000 for each instance a minor accesses their content, and parents are allowed to sue for damages of at least $50,000. This means that the state can "require age verification to access LGBTQ content," according to attorney Alejandra Caraballo, who said on Threads that "Kansas residents may soon need their state IDs" to access material that simply "depicts LGBTQ people."
One newspaper opinion piece argues there's an easier solution: don't buy your children a smartphone: Or we could purchase any of the various software packages that block social media and obscene content from their devices. Or we could allow them to use social media, but limit their screen time. Or we could educate them about the issues that social media causes and simply trust them to make good choices. All of these options would have been denied to us if we lived in a state that passed a strict age verification law. Not only do age verification laws reduce parental freedom, but they also create myriad privacy risks. Requiring platforms to collect government IDs and face scans opens the door to potential exploitation by hackers and enemy governments. The very information intended to protect children could end up in the wrong hands, compromising the privacy and security of millions of users...
Ultimately, age verification laws are a misguided attempt to address the complex issue of underage social media use. Instead of placing undue burdens on users and limiting parental liberty, lawmakers should look for alternative strategies that respect privacy rights while promoting online safety.
This week a trade association for the adult entertainment industry announced plans to petition America's Supreme Court to intervene.
Protecting children (Score:3, Interesting)
If republicans actually cared about children they wouldn't be doing away with programs like school breakfasts and anything else that helps children born into shitty situations. You want to help children? Offer daycare services that don't cost double a typical mortgage payment. How many of the forced birth close your legs slut crowd has adopted an unwanted baby? In the words of Dean Wormer "zero, point, zero".
Re: Protecting children (Score:2)
This.
It's also absurd that when work sends me to the 3rd world Republican states I have to use a VPN to see boobies.
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You could also go to town and find yourself real boobies in glorious 3D and touch-o-vision.
Re: Protecting children (Score:2)
Re: Protecting children (Score:4)
Ironically, these restrictions are slowly being eased in the Middle East. I was in Saudi for work a couple of years ago, and the difference between that and my previous visit five years beforehand was striking: a Riyadh mall that I went to both times had removed its sex-segregated queues and seating in its food courts. I saw some women drivers. Many women’s hijabs were noticeably lighter. Women were running large and impressive organisations (the CTO at a major public hospital was a woman, and the deputy was a shell-shocked older man who’d previously had her job but was way outclassed by her). Saudi remains a much worse place to be a woman than Texas, but the gap is narrowing more than you might think.
Re: Protecting children (Score:4, Insightful)
Votes. Controlling the votes. (Score:3)
The Christian Taliban are only for protecting embryos and fetuses because it's a way to control women.
Read Long Southern Strategy [facingsouth.org] by Dr. Angie Maxwell.
It lays bare the entire strategy to grab onto and hold the power in the hands of a white conservative minority - through racism, sexism and white Christian nationalism.
You know... Fascism.
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You ... do realize there's still such a thing as a failure rate on contraception, right?
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Also the conjured binary of it only being forcible rape or completely voluntary sex is a blatantly false distortion of reality.
And then there is the fact that he left out point 4) -- that any of broad range of possible health consequences may be involved.
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What's not responsible about getting an abortion to deal with the fallout of a sexual encounter? If you catch an STD, I bet you also get to a clinic to get rid of it, or would you just ride out the syphilis?
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I think that commentor is currently riding out the syphilis. It's why they made such a inane comment.
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Yup. That insurance in this case is called an abortion. Just like the insurance, it doesn't avoid having the problem, it only allows you to get out of it without having to suffer for it.
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The right-wing pro-life crowd has a long history of running adoption/foster care services and orphanages.
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The right-wing pro-life crowd has a long history of running adoption/foster care services and orphanages.
Yes, exactly right. One shining example of this is the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland [wikipedia.org]
So parents ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Websites can be fined up to $10,000 for each instance a minor accesses their content, and parents are allowed to sue for damages of at least $50,000.
So parents are allowed to fail to adequately parent and get to profit off of it?
The party of personal responsibility, everyone!
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Yep. Two things can happen: a child too young for some content can be exposed to it because they're not properly supervised, or a child old enough that they should be able to handle it can't because they weren't prepared by the adults in their lives.
I really don't get why so many people complain about the state wanting to raise their children when those same people are the ones who scream bloody murder if the state won't do it for them. If you have children, watch over them until you've raised them into f
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My child is 8. I have terminal cancer and will be lucky to see his 9th birthday, let alone anything beyond that.
So, no, I won't be able to watch over him until he becomes a functioning adult.
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I empathize...
However, the world isn't built around you, or me, or any single human, for that matter.
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I do hope your child has another parent or guardian that will take over for you when you're no longer able to be a parent.
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He has a mother. But her parenting style is such that he will grow up to be a worthless momma's boy or a criminal of some kind...or maybe both.
It's the worst thing about all of this....and it's completely out of my hands.
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No it isn't. But the poster I responded to say "you" and "your child".
I was talking about me and my child.
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They never were a party of parental responsibility. Parental responsibility is bad to them. That's why they want to get into the bedroom, and make sure you're doing it with the right kind of person. That when you're doing it, the proper result happens. And when the result happens, they come up in the straight and narrow.
They're all for snooping around in your neighbor's business - a
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Websites can be fined up to $10,000 for each instance a minor accesses their content, and parents are allowed to sue for damages of at least $50,000.
I'm waiting for when a religious website gets sued for bible passages that contain: "acts of masturbation, homosexuality, or sexual intercourse."
Just like when conservative author Bill O'Reilly's books got banned in Florida, all of a sudden his support for book bans changed.
So parents are allowed to fail to adequately parent and get to profit off of it?
Maybe it's a jobs program? A few wins/year and you're making 150k and your attorney's making bank as well.
The party of personal responsibility, everyone!
They take personal responsibility so seriously that want to ensure you act in ways they deem responsible...
Hehe. Let's ban some ascii characters too (Score:2)
(.)(.)
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Googly eyes? try harder sunshine. :P
The trolls have you beat 7 ways to sunday when it comes to the flood of bad actor ascii.
(no, don't actually flood with bad spam please. I am just teasing)
Re: Hehe. Let's ban some ascii characters too (Score:3)
Bunny ears, you insensitive clod!
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Try this [nationalgeographic.com]
Dark age of the Internet? (Score:2)
No. This won't drag us back to the "dark age of the Internet". There was no "dark age of the Internet" unless one counts what's going on right now.
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It's a matter of perspective. For those of us there from close to the beginning, AOL was the dawn of 'Eternal September' and Usenet more or less started to die off to be replaced by the web. For a while that was OK until consolidation started and a handful of companies effectively became 'the Internet' if you wanted to be accessing content in common with anyone else.
For companies that have learned to be profitable with very little in the way of regulation, this is a NEW Dark Age. Definitely not a return
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I remember the day AOL opened the floodgates. I wouldn't call it the dark ages, it was a mixed bag, but in the end, giving the public access to the Internet cannot be considered worse than what was before.
There was another big transition... the day the USA passed laws allowing the Internet to be used by corporations. Before it was gov't, education, and military only. That was an even bigger deal, but I wouldn't call either the time before or after the dark ages.
Up until recently, things just got better
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I'm pretty sure the "dark age of the internet" was when people tried to access the internet over dial-up modems and running a browser...
I thought the web as we knew it was going to disappear back when Ajit Pai decided the FTC should manage fraud by ISPs rather than the FCC, thus killing Net Neutrality, and taking away the Internet as we knew it?
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Bingo. We have SEOs eroding search engine results, we have AI poised to take over the job of generating a tidal wave of garbage data to catch web users into marketing nonsense. I mean seriously, I used to be able to go on the Internet in the "dark ages" and pull up a recipe that is concise and to the point, lacking a five page rambling preamble.
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Bingo. I recall getting more relevant search results using Lycos or Webcrawler. We don't have search engines anymore, the profit motive is too strong to allow them to remain that way. They're pitch engines.
Dark Age existed but this will not return it (Score:2)
There was no "dark age of the Internet"
Well there was a time, very early on in the web, when it could not support images - or at least the browsers could not. That could arguably be the "dark ages" of the web. That was back when most of the sites were at CERN or other computing or particle labs around the globe. One of the first browsers to support images (Mosiac IIRC?) even had a weird bug on VMS where the image was displayed twice. I doubt age verification laws are going to take us back to this though.
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Yeah, I dunno. I think dial-up access counts.
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I remember dial up. It was less censored.
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Didn't need to censor it. There was almost nothing to see compared to now.
Let me understand this... (Score:2)
What will happen, and is already happening, is that people — including minors — will go to unmoderated, actively harmful alternatives that don't require handing over a government-issued ID to see people have sex.
So the argument is that mainstream porn is keeping "people - including minors" from "unmoderated, actively harmful alternatives"? These "unmoderated, actively harmful alternatives" are what, exactly, and how, precisely is mainstream porn keeping "people - including minors" away from these "alternatives"?
Re:Let me understand this... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's better analogized with how netflix USED to be, and pirate media (with viruses, and other crap).
When media is simple and easy to obtain, people prefer that method to get to it, and the pirate option withers (it never actually dies, but it does significantly decline)
This was very famously documented with the initial rise of streaming services. (The current landscape has all the usual rent-seekers out looking for their pounds of flesh like the craven psychos that they are, but historically, the rise of streaming saw a PROFOUND reduction in pirate activity.)
Likewise, when you have very low barrier to legitimate purveyors of pornography, that see to actor needs and health, and that adequately take measures to ensure that all parts of their enterprise run correctly, people will prefer to get their pornography from them.
When such operators cannot actually-- OPERATE-- people wont stop wanting smut.
They will instead, seek out the purveyors or creators of porn that DO NOT do those things, and a nasty rise in sex-industry related crimes will ensue.
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1000x - just look at mindgeeks track record here. The 'legitimate' industry is as parasitical and abusive as the black market.
Politicians need to win elections. (Score:5, Insightful)
Will nobody think of the politicians and their ego? When will one of you idiots realize what it's like to be a politician today? It's not easy, and it's stressful. First off, to be a successful politician, you need pariahs and boogeymen .. while at the same time you may need their votes. It used to be easy .. just designate some group as the cause of all the nation's troubles, yell about them and you're done. But nowadays, with elections being close and all, how do you designate a boogeyman when you may need that same boogeyman's vote come election day? No, you have to keep coming up with more and more abstract boogeymen, and let your future-self worry about pissing them off in some far future election.
Technological illiterates (Score:5, Insightful)
Their own kids are probably laughing at them. Everyone else's certainly are.
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Politicians don't do anything that won't re-elect them. They don't need to understand the consequences of the laws they pass, they only need to know if it makes them more popular.
Meaning you have to remember that if politicians pass ridiculous and dangerous laws in the bible belt states, you can squarely put the blame on the voters in those states, because if they didn't want that shit, the politicians wouldn't do it.
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I don't even know if they're politically literate.
I'm under the impression there is a mass of people, including politicians that think that the government are the dragon balls and all you have to do is make a wish and it will automatically become true.
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A law to block VPNs will probably come next. And since that's hard to enforce .. a ban on encryption will follow that. We know the feds have been relentlessly maneuvering on being able to ban encryption for the past 30 years. I was around in the 90s and remember them trying to force the Clipper chip on us. Basically they wanted it so that we could use "encryption" as long as government agencies had the key to decrypt it. Won't be long before they start peddling "key escrow" based encryption again for the sa
These Laws Don't Prevent Parents From Parenting (Score:2)
Or we could purchase any of the various software packages that block social media and obscene content from their devices. Or we could allow them to use social media, but limit their screen time. Or we could educate them about the issues that social media causes and simply trust them to make good choices. All of these options would have been denied to us if we lived in a state that passed a strict age verification law.
How do age verification laws prevent parents from:
1) Installing blocking software?
2) Limiting Screen Time?
3) Educate children about issues with social media?
4) Trusting our children from making good choices?
We have strict age verification laws around buying tobacco products, alcohol, and guns, and they don't prevent parents from "parenting" their children on those subjects, what's so different about online porn?
Re:These Laws Don't Prevent Parents From Parenting (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't. Nobody is saying they do.
What they DO, is create a false sense of security that Timmy wont be able to access the porn, and that this means Mommy and Daddy can postpone talking to Timmy about such "Base" things as prostitution, how he should properly interact with women he is sexually interested in, the myriad reasons why he should not be actively seeking sex at such a young age, and other "Unthinkable!" concepts that parents need to start having, rather than repeating "But my BABY BOY is INNOCENT AND PURE!" ad infinitum.
But let's break these down.
1) Installing blocking software should be a last resort, really. This is the solution you should reach for when having meaningful conversations with your children FAIL. This is because the installation of this software sends a powerful, unspoken message to your child-- "I DO NOT TRUST YOU. I CONTROL YOU. I FORBID YOU ANY AUTONOMY."
Naturally, children seeking to grow in autonomy HATE that, and it will be the source of significant friction between you and your children.
If you are operating a business, or an institution that specializes in chidren (like a school), then sure-- It's in your best interests to protect yourself against the bad choices of your charges or patrons-- by all means, install the software, but PARENTS should be PARENTING first!!
2) Limiting screen time is good and healthy, and they SHOULD have been doing this since day one, in a consistent and healthy manner. Most parents dont do this, and only limit screen time PUNITIVELY. See my response about silent messages above.
3) VERY GOOD! This conversation should be open, and freeform, with nothing held back or barred. You might want to tailor your responses to things that are age appropriate, but do your best to foster this kind of dialog with your kids. You WANT them to come to you FIRST when they have questions, and you WANT to give them accurate and complete information, so that they CAN make good decisions.
4) You only get here when you have been properly parenting from the start. Expecting to get here after several years of coasting on the "But my kids are ANGELS!" mindset, when suddenly "THE DREADED PUBERTY" hits, is a non-sequitur.
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They don't offer a false sens of anything. Nobody is arguing that id laws are someone a replacement for parenting. This entire argument line is just a strawman.
We have age verification on other products that harmful or potentially so and involve issues and risks we don't believe that minors are able to judge fully. The assumption is not that your high school-er can't get their hands on a tub of dip or pack of smokes; but maybe your middle school-er that you allowed to take their bicycle to the C-store wo
Re: These Laws Don't Prevent Parents From Parentin (Score:3)
Tobacco, alcohol and guns are physical products. There is an opportunity to verify the ID in person, at point of sale or delivery. Not so with online porn.
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Um... I was under the impression the "ATF" trifecta can be bought online, as well.
Re: These Laws Don't Prevent Parents From Parenti (Score:2)
Legally ?
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Yes, legally.
Well, I have to nuance a bit. In my country, you can order alcohol and tobacco online, if you're over 18, of course. ID is not checked (in person or on the website) if you order online. I know of several cases where someone (incidentally, an adult, but, again, there was no online ID check) ordered alcohol online and the package was delivered to their homes, where their child received it from the courier.
Firearm ownership is illegal here, unless you fill a ton of paperwork, and people who have t
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Alcohol, tobacco and firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
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Firearms can not be bought online legally. You can pay for it online and have it shipped to a local FFL dealer, and that dealer will then do the background check and all the required paperwork.
Some states do allow you to buy alcohol online. I've never done that so you'll have to find a place and read the FAQ.
Financial Incentives (Score:2)
How do age verification laws prevent parents from...
They do not prevent parents from doing any of that but they do provide a great financial incentive not to since, if you don't parent your kids and they gain access to some porn site you can sue them for $50k whereas if you do parent them they may end up going to university and costing you $50k instead. Providing a financial incentive for bad parenting is a very bad idea.
Re: Financial Incentives (Score:2)
On the other hand, the more forbidden the porn, the more likely teens are going to try to watch it.
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Quite frankly, for most parents, this will not solve anything. Realize the following:
1. Kids, in general, know more about the internet than their parents.
2. Kids, in general, have way, way more spare time than their parents.
3. Kids, in general, are way, way more motivated to find ways around parents' rules than parents want to waste on establishing or even controlling them.
4. Kids, in general, get massive kudos from their peers if they know how to thwart parents' rules and regulations.
You cannot win this fi
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Limiting screen time doesn't really work all that well. If I limit my daughter's screen time on her tablet, she'll just switch over to her school's Chromebook and watch her favorite brain rotting YouTube Shorts content on that. I won't let her watch TikTok, but it doesn't matter because all of the popular content gets migrated over to the other video platforms anyway. Hell, most of them don't even bother removing the TikTok logos from it.
I have no control over the settings on her Chromebook (the school does
Back to Dark Ages of the Internet? (Score:2)
Isn't more like we are currently in the dark ages of the internet?
The golden age was a pop-up prompts, and websites like cat-scan.com
http://cat-scan.com/cat-scan/ [cat-scan.com]
The forbidden nature of it makes it exciting (Score:2)
Making porn hard to access makes it all the more attractive to kids.
When I was a kid, sometimes we found a raunchy magazine with naked girls in it. As soon as we'd leave school, we'd hide in the woods to gaze at the ladies - and delight in the forbidden nature of what we had in our hands as much as the content itself. Because it was rare. Now porn is everywhere and it's just "meh..."
It's the same reason why neo-nazis in the US are a fringe phenomenon that most people look at thinking "What a bunch of idiots
It's not sending us back to the internet dark ages (Score:5, Insightful)
We already are in the dark ages of the internet.
The golden age was the mid-nineties to mid-2000s. Today it's all privacy violation, surveillance and dystopia. The age verification thing is just more of the same.
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The diamond age of the internet was when you needed an IQ above room temperature to get on.
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I have fond memories of the internet that was... I think the unofficial turning point was when 14.4k became the norm, but Electronic Arts' unskippable splash page was 4MB.
Now all you need to know is that googling "where is the WPS button on my router" leads for to four minute videos instead of returning one line of text like, "on the bottom of the unit to the left of the model info sticker".
A few thoughts (Score:2)
Starting with one's own government. No-one complains about identity tracking to stop crime but identity tracking to 'save' children: That's obviously an invasion of privacy. In truth, it's all about government spying on adults.
It's easy to think the 'no naked women' rule isn't working but a lot of images have disappeared from the internet. This is censorship first, and nanny-state over-parenting, second.
Step 1: teach child to use internet
Step 2: teach child to create fake online Id. Step 3: ??? Step
Because that's a completely different thing... (Score:2)
...Altogether.
> inevitably reducing everything we see online without impossible privacy hurdles and compromises to that which is not "harmful to minors."
Funny how they're not wanting to do that with the whole school shootings thing, though, isn't it?
I'd say it's a hell of a lot worse than that (Score:4, Informative)
It also shows without a shadow of a doubt that small government conservatism is a lie.
Dark ages of the Internet???? (Score:2)
The net since its founding has NEVER been dark. It was always way ahead of the times.
Age verification being bad?? Nope. What is bad is not having a decent way to check it. If governments are going to require companies to check these, then they need to provide vetted Digital Certificates.
The children must be protected! (Score:5, Funny)
Especially the children of conservatives. For instance, their little boys are so easily manipulated that finding "two daddies" in a book will immediately cause them to suck off the nearest guy. That must be it, right? It couldn't possibly be that all these book banners are just nimrods.
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Really? So that's how the priests get them?
Whitelist ISPs? (Score:3)
A visit to a friend with teenagers many years ago introduced me to an ISP that vetted ALL the sites it allowed access to. I needed access to something, and got a very quick response from the ISP as to why that wasn't legitimate (parts of the site were iffy, which I hadn't realised).
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Cellphone hotspot, VPN connection.
You think your teenager doesn't know that?
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VPNs wouldn't be available on the white list. (That's my understanding - am I wrong there?)
Cell phones would, indeed, provide an alternative ISP in practice, but that would give some greater control.
There were no internet dark ages. (Score:2)
The internet was glorious and it's been going downhill ever since people found out about it. And we're not going back, it's just a choice of two different ways to make it worse. The past is gone, forever to be lamented.
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There were no internet dark ages.
Not yet at least. But they're about to come.
Slippery slope (Score:2)
Are they arguing that the internet is fundamentally ungovernable in its current state? If that's the case, then it needs to be changed.
These are the dark ages (Score:2)
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We made the horrible mistake to let the masses into our beautiful garden.
Back when the net was young and so were we, it was a vast, beautiful space. Sure, it was a bit crude, especially at the edges, it was very hard to navigate because there were at best some dirt roads with a lot of brushes overgrowing them constantly that you had to hack free for yourself because nobody bothered, except maybe the person who lived behind it and actually wanted to have visitors, but we did get by. There weren't any power t
How do you do this ... (Score:2)
...we will fine the website ... in another country, that has no physical presence here.... and is outside our jurisdiction
Who will police this, how much will that cost, and how little effect will it have ...
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Even worse. How do you want to police a website abroad getting accessed from abroad from a VPN used by your citizen?
Note that neither the citizen, nor the VPN provider, nor the porn provider will willingly assist you in stopping any of them.
not going to stop it (Score:2)
The laws do not mean a thing. There are just too many ways online to get a porn fix without verification.
No that would be the religous prudes (Score:2)
So, which is it? (Score:2)
Is it impossible, or will it bring in the dark ages?
Also, can I ... as is my bad habit ... question some of the contradictions out there? I mean, will this [slashdot.org] bring in the dark ages too? We can't try to keep the full image from ten year olds, but we need to protect full grown CS women from a crop of her face and shoulder?
This legislation (Score:2)
sponsored by NordVPN.
they're just going to do it anyway (Score:2)
You know that argument also applies to things like rape, yeah?
I'm not sure why people think anyone will find that convincing.
Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (Score:4, Informative)
I don't understand how the 5th circuit can make the decision that these laws are ok when they should be bound by the supreme court's decision in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union.
We've done this entire thing once before with the communications decency act of 96. The ACLU sued, it went to the supreme court and the supreme court struck down government mandated age verification..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
We are already there, at least on the web (Score:3)
Of course, Republicans and Democrats alike will both applaud the creation of new markets designed to create recurring, taxable revenue I'm sure...
Re:$1 fee (more like $3-$5 to cover CC fees) (Score:5, Insightful)
except you can get a "credit card" at the checkout line of a grocery these days.
this is no barrier at all.
The notion that you can somehow legislate away Timmy's ability to see "all that dirty smut" is as captivating as it is corrupting.
We really do need to be more forceful in telling our peers that, NO, you wont succeed in that endeavor, short of completely isolating Timmy from the world, which would do him significantly more harm than the "smut" ever would.
Own up to being fucking parents. Be more active in talking with your children. Understand that "Little Timmy" wont always stay little. If he's looking for porn, you need to eject that notion of him as "an innocent little boy" and put on your grown-up pants, and understand that the "early childhood" part of his life is past now, and you need to adapt your approach.
No amount of Jesus is going to stop that from happening.
Pretending credit cards are only things adults can get is dumb.
Pretending that you can make an effective age verification hurdle (or more accurately, that such hurdles will somehow restrict timmy from porn viewing) is dumb.
Pretending you can dictate "morality" is dumb.
Sorry folks. You actually have to TALK to your kids.
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except you can get a "credit card" at the checkout line of a grocery these days.
Pretty sure CC companies can detect pre-paid "credit" cards from traditional {real} credit cards.
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Not really.
They are debit cards. Many banks issue debit cards, and many americans with horribly bad credit, can only get their paychecks using such cards.
As such, while it is easy enough to track if such a card is prepaid or not, determining if there is a 50 year old man on the other end, or a 14 year old boy, and doing so in a way that does not dry up business, is much less feasible.
Especially when cash is involved in the purchase of such cards.
Re:$1 fee (more like $3-$5 to cover CC fees) (Score:5, Informative)
Re: $1 fee (more like $3-$5 to cover CC fees) (Score:2)
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Re:$1 fee (more like $3-$5 to cover CC fees) (Score:5, Insightful)
isolating Timmy from the world, which would do him significantly more harm than the "smut" ever would.
That leads to another point: Internet porn has been around for literally 35+ years. So... where are all the peer-reviewed studies about screwed-up 45-year-olds, scarred by the things they were exposed to at 10?
Want to ban lead in gasoline? You do some tests, and demonstrate that it causes brain damage. Want to enforce motorcycle helmet laws? You do some tests, and demonstrate that helmets reduce brain damage. Want to pass massively privacy-invading, freedom-cramping legislation in the name of "the children"? You need to do some tests and show that Internet porn does actual, quantifiable, measurable, demonstrable harm to children.
Bonus... I personally suspect that access just helps us to learn about ourselves as we grow up. All I mean by this is that as a young adult when I first encountered porn, I pretty quickly realized what I liked and what I didn't like. It didn't make me like things I wasn't going to like regardless. I learned what acts I was interested in (at least watching, not necessarily doing), and what was revolting. When it eventually came time to have a partner, I was better equipped to enjoy the bedroom, and more confident that asking for what I like wasn't absurd because... well... if there's a whole section on every site dedicated to whatever, maybe I shouldn't be ashamed because I'm not alone.
I'm straight and don't have any fringe kinks. I can only imagine how isolated a porn-less teen who is unsure about their orientation or maybe has thoughts about hot candle wax and struggles with it all must feel. Yes, we somehow survived for thousands of years before Internet porn, but... we also used to have massive hangups about gay people and ankles and... you get the point. Maybe we're better off. Maybe. Perhaps some studies?
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if you want ME to "take care of your kids", then yes, you ought to pay me to do it.
Otherwise, step up and be a responsible parent. It's not the world's job to raise your child and instill the values you want them to have. I believe legisnation like this is mostly the result of lazy parents that expect (and want to FORCE) the world to do the parenting they can't be bothered to do themselves.
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Is it easier to get porn off pornhub today than it was for you to bypass age verification checks on pay sites when you were a teenager?
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Quite frankly, what I do expect out of it is that people finally start to get a bit smarter about using the internet because now they have a motivation to find out how to get around that bullshit.
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