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> There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology.

The first three are physical things, not information. Porn can be debated, but the current age verification push is trying to impose blanket control on the entire information ecosystem. It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhere or do anything, rather than just a few well-defined things.

Even if we view it as a good faith attempt (which it is not, remember what Edward Snowden exposed), the parental authority over a child's information diet is being transferred away from parents to tech companies. They're legally mandating you to give away your child's personal info (just age for now, but they'll demand more if we give them this) and make the decisions on what is suitable, instead of you making those decisions for your child.

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> the parental authority over a child's information diet is being transferred away from parents to tech companies

These companies not only wanted that but they exploited the shit out of it for obscene profit! In many ways it was their unabated greed that has caused this situation: from addicting design of video feeds, grooming obscene spending habits, collectively doing as little as possible to keep predators and inappropriate content out of games for children.

And how could parents police effectively "the whole internet", it's like expecting them to police what their kids see and hear at school on lunch break x 1000 you cannot control all the things that can influence a child for better or worse. Maximum security prisons can't stop people from accessing the internet and making phone calls so what hope did parents ever have?

We could have avoided this if Google and Apple had enough decency to keep the bad stuff from becoming effortlessly, trivially accessible to children, but they made a fortune off Roblox instead of applying their policies and noticing the abundance of pornography and predators, they ignored Grok churning out CSAM as fast as people could request it, no response to court revelations that Zuckerburg's apps are teeming with sex traffickers, prostitutes and scammers, no response to apps excessively exploiting addiction other than making sure they get their cut.

So now we're caught between a rock and a hard place, a completely unsustainable system where everybody who should be accountable claims to have immunity, and parents are incapable of enforcing a healthy upbringing for their children in this mess.

> It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhere or do anything, rather than just a few well-defined things.

No, it's social media, specifically. That's why it says social media. It's not everything, it's social media.

For now.

Banning selling alcohol to children is a slippery slope to banning candy and then banning food and then banning giving water to children. Right?

> They're legally mandating you to give away your child's personal info

If you don’t want to use social media you don’t have to give away the info right?

If you don't want to use ~~social media~~ any website that could contain content deemed as "adult".

And what's "adult"? Hardcore pornography? Sex ed material? Otherwise-G-rated content that happens to have a gay person in it?

Information is a material concern

Relationships are a concern (random people interacting with your child? Good Gosh!)

Privacy is a huge concern for children, way more so than is afforded we regular netizens.

"They're legally mandating you to give away your child's personal info " - no they are not, they're mandating age requirements, which is a separate thing.

Snowden did not bring up age restrictions.

"instead of you making those decisions for your child."

I'm sorry but today the choice is not by parents, the point of the age restrictions is so that parents ultimately can have a choice (they and provide access by their own accounts).

The 'all or nothing' issue of the internet is a big deal - parents don't really have a choice.

These are mostly ideological and rhetorical arguments, not grounded in pragmatism.

The pragmatic concern is 'abuse of control' (aka the 'general' Snowden argument), which is real, but can also be avoided if they do it right.

Granted, I don't have a lot of faith that they will do it well.

> It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhere or do anything, rather than just a few well-defined things.

Are you aware that most library systems across most of the world require someone to be 16+ to open an account and/or take out books and materials? That's not restricting anything, that's preventing abuse by those not intellectually or emotionally capable of regulating their behaviour. The parent of the under 16 takes responsibility for their actions, essentially.

If you have to be 16+ to take materials out of a library, why should a minor be able to access _anything_ on the Internet without also having an adult check what it is you're doing? Why should a 12 year old be able to freely visit "innocent-website.tld" without it first being confirm the website actually is innocent? What if it's innocent today, but adopts a new doctrine tomorrow? There's a reason YouTube doesn't let you change a video upload after you've published it: you could upload nearly anything to replace your previously innocent and successful video.

Nothing changes between the physical world and the virtual one. The same problems exist, except the virtual one makes it easier to access much darker information.

The library is one place out of the many places you could go, and the closest digital equivalent is a library website or an app. The Internet is not just a library, but a whole world of its own. We don't have blanket control laws that restrict all movement and speech in the real world based on verified age. The restrictions for minors are implemented at much more local levels.

We do need parental guidance like in the physical world, but such guidance should be issued by the parents, not the tech companies. Age verification is about giving your age and some other identifying metadata to the tech companies, and they hold the authority to decide what to filter. It should be other way around. The companies should expose metadata about their service and the content in their feeds via public APIs, and let people filter stuff locally on the device per the device owners' aka the parents' preferences. Oh wait. Such features will never reach mass adoption in the current software ecosystem. Software antitrust is a joke. These companies and the feds have the opposite incentives and do everything to sabotage local solutions. They've locked down what OS you can run on the hardware you bought, what apps are approved on their walled garden OS, and only the official apps can access their APIs. You don't have root on your own phone and it's a brick without remote authentication. Now they can sell you parenting plus many other things as their exclusive cloud service because "the market failed to deliver" and you can't really control what software runs on your own phone, much less your child's phone. This is the upstream problem and we ought to see it clearly and assign the blame correctly rather than trust those who deliberately created the problem to solve it.

> We do need parental guidance like in the physical world, but such guidance should be issued by the parents, not the tech companies.

By putting up ID roadblocks, that forces the parents to intervene. That's the point :)