alt Hacker NewsThat's a completely unhelpful, overly simplistic straw man argument.
We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction), allowing predators to interact with children,, manipulating children through advertising and algorithms, flaming harmful behaviors like eating disorders, allowing mass cyberbullying and so on.
So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed. The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors. This will take away the financial incentive for these platforms to create addictive behaivors in minors. And most of these tech platforms have already built the infrastructure to do this. You don't allow advertisers to target an audience based on (actual or inferred) ages under 18. You extend that to proxies for age, like an interest in Minecraft. And you make advertising to children illegal.
Arguably, I'd go further and restrict certain features for minors, such as comments on Youtube and an algorithmic feed.
At the moment nobody is solving anything because it's simply a fight to move liability to someone else. Meta wants hardware vendors to be responsible because, guess what?, they have no hardware platform. Apple and Google likely want app to have to deal with it for the complete opposite reason.
I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
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> We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos.
These are not equivalent. Restricting access to a casino just requires showing an ID to a person. A few seconds later and that person has completely forgotten everything about you. They will not keep a record of your home address, etc. Perfectly privacy preserving. You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.
I don't think anyone here minds restricting access, but that doesn't require completely destroying ownership rights over our own devices nor internet and device privacy.
All that really needs to be done is for servers to publish what type of content they show from a parental perspective in a machine-readable format and for devices to have parental controls that only allow access to servers that publish such info and which content is allowed by the parental settings.
This should be even more effective than solutions requiring uploading IDs since there's still going to be servers out there in other jurisdictions that simply don't care for such things.
> So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.
The market failure to provide an adequate solution wasn't natural. It was engineered by the tech companies and you are playing right into their hands. There is still a way to fix this from the root with software antitrust: force hardware vendors to ship their devices without an operating system.
Here's a more detailed explanation in a past comment about how the problem came to be in the first place, and why software antitrust can solve it:
> So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.
Absolute bullshit. This "unfettered access" is the whole reason why I am who I am today, why I am here. Not only did it not fail, it's in fact so successful it threatens the powers that be, and that's the real reason why they want to ban it.
> I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors.
Now this I agree with. I would be even more radical. It's not just advertising "to minors", all advertising needs to get banned straight up. Advertising is mind rape. Ban it and all the problems with the web will be fixed literally overnight, including the problems "mandated hardware attestation" aims to solve. There is no need whatsoever for this attestation nonsense.
We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.
What you're saying is correct - but it's used to push a much more comprehensive lockdown of devices that has absolutely nothing to do with protection of minors.
It's as if the government first let businesses install slot machines at every street corner, then suddenly went "I'm shocked, shocked! that we have a massive epidemic of gambling addiction here, we have to mandate anti-gambling shock collars for everyone to tackle this urgent problem! There is no alternative!"
>So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.
How has it failed? Whats the measure of a successful freedom vs an unsuccessful one.
>The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
No its the positive case for action that remains to be justified.
>> "We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction)" --- I will need a source, because "arguably" is a very broad umbrella.
"Arguably" heroin addiction is the most harmful addiction because heroin is the most addictive substance, clouds judgement and drives the addict to all manners of sociopathic behaviour (not only theft or prostitition)
What's simplistic and unhelpful is falling for the narrative that infinite scroll, boobies, and algorithmic feeds are somehow more harmful than ubiquitous government surveillance of the most powerful communication tool on earth. The Internet, more or less, has been around 30+ years and the Something awful and 4chan generations are now in charge. We're not much worse off. The Internet is actually way tamer these days than it used to be.
We can all agree that yeah sure this social media stuff isn't great, but that's the whole point of freedom. Fast food isn't great either but lawmakers aren't pushing for a junk food attestation framework to make sure you don't consume it more than twice a week. In other words, your best interest is not interesting to them at all. They are happy that you think it is somehow self evident that we should subject ourselves to undue surveillance through!
So, wonder why they're pushing for this so hard. I'll take the brainrot if it means criticism and ideas can spread without permanently being associated with a trackable, unchanging identity.