alt Hacker NewsThat's not parents issue. That's why we go after people who sell or give drugs to kids. Is a serious offense, we don't wave our hands and say its parents problem and not drugging kids is a popular policy unlike drug enforcement for adults.
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Everything is a parents issue.
If you are depending on the police to keep your kid from doing drugs, you have failed as a parent. I promise you, your kid can locate drugs better than the cops can arrest low level dealers.
You as a parent need to teach your kid how to behave (mostly through things like teaching ethics and morals) not by running a safe prison until your kid is 18.
And yes, I am a parent of multiple kids.
So sure, we go after anybody who gives or sells devices without basic parental controls directly to kids. So you need to be 18 to buy a phone, which we're 90% of the way to anyway with the way credit cards work.
The fundamental point is that the Internet is not a daycare. All of these attempts to put the burden on sites boil down to changing this dynamic, recasting the Internet as if it should be appropriate to use as a daycare. Today it's big tech and porn. Tomorrow it's any writing that the the religious reich dislikes. Monday it's technical sites as they can help kids bypass restrictions. Tuesday it's international sites being blocked at the ISP-level because they don't bother with any of this crap.
We also need to remember the context here, lest we carry water for big tech's continued abuse. The main reason the surveillance industry is reaching for age verification (ie identity verification) is that harm to children is so far the only regulatory cause of action that has been found to stick. Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information. Where what we actually need is to stop their abuse for adults as well - eg data privacy, anti-trust regulation to open up their services to competing clients, and at this point probably straight up regulation of purposely-addictive "algorithmic" feeds.
Yeah, but that assumes, that there are people out there, selling smartphones to children at scale. First the price for one is way to large for the financial budget of a child, and second that gets even more price-intensive, after the first one got confiscated by the parent.