alt Hacker NewsI appreciate their effort but isn't Matrix (the company) based out of the UK and primary hosted instances on AWS in the UK? The UK were the first AFAIK to create such internet laws [0]. I could imagine people running their own instances in places where the age laws are not yet active but that number is shrinking fast. [1]
Their solution is for everyone to pay for Matrix with a credit card to verify age. I assume that means there must be a way to force only paid registered accounts to join ones instance? What percentage of the accounts on Discord are paid for with a credit or debit card? Or boosted? I don't keep up with terminology
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...
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Matrix is a protocol, not a service. It's likely the UK government can enforce laws against content and accounts hosted on the matrix.org servers, but no single government has jurisdiction over the entire network.
Couldn't you simply set up your own instance and link up with the wider network? I guess you would have to age verify yourself if you live in a country that requires it, but regulating that would be sort of hilarious.
It's an interesting legal question, but I would imagine for a federated service, the burden of proof should be on the individual's home server for age verification. That's where the user account is, after all.
Matrix is basically labeled "adults only" everywhere, so restricting certain servers/rooms due to possible innocent eyes is likely out of scope.
The Australian law doesn't care where servers are run. I don't know about others.
I wrote the OP, so to try to clarify:
> isn't Matrix based out of the UK and primary hosted instances on AWS in the UK?
It doesn't matter what country you run your server in or where your company is based; if you're providing public signup to a chat server then the countries (UK, AU, NZ etc) which require age verification will object if you don't age verify the users from those countries. (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd). In other words, the fact that The Matrix.org Foundation happens to be UK HQ'd doesn't affect the situation particularly.
(Edit: also, as others have pointed out, Matrix is a protocol, not a service or a product. The Matrix Foundation is effectively a standards body which happens to run the matrix.org server instance, but the jurisdiction that the standards body is incorporated in makes little difference - just like IETF being US-based doesn't mean the Internet is actually controlled by the US govt).
> Their solution is for everyone to pay for Matrix with a credit card to verify age.
Verifying users in affected countries based on owning a credit card is one solution we're proposing; suspect there will be other ways to do so too. However: this would only apply on the matrix.org server instance. Meanwhile, there are 23,306 other servers currently federating with matrix.org (out of a total of 156,055) - and those other servers, if they provide public signup, can figure out how to solve the problem in their own way.
Also, the current plan on the matrix.org server is to only verify users who are in affected countries (as opposed to try to verify the whole userbase as Discord is).