[0x_rs]

The war on the free internet is accelerating. Without real push-back to these dystopian laws and consequences for the people proposing and lobbying for them, you'll miss what will ultimately end up being a temporary anomaly of mostly unrestrained free flow of information. It's not an hypothetical scenario or something that will develop down the line, it's happening today, worldwide.

[RpFLCL]

I heard from a friend last night that they were unable to see posts on X about current protests in their country because those were considered "adult" content which can now only be viewed after submitting to an ID check. Not porn, video of a protest.

You're 100% right that it's happening today.

[btown]

It’s really important to remember in this context that “the purpose of a system is what it does.”

Do not think for a moment that ID verification primarily protects children and only incidentally enables authoritarian restrictions on speech. Do not think for a second that verification initiatives are designed without anticipating this outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[stinkbeetle]

Sadly the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries - if their team decided that the content is "problematic", then they are entirely justified in censoring and punishing the speakers for daring to speak it, and entirely justified in protecting everybody else from having to suffer the horror of reading/seeing/hearing it, and it matters not whether the mechanisms are legal or ethical because the ends justify the means.

[GuB-42]

> Not porn, video of a protest

Not commenting on ID checks but depending on the protest, some images can be violent and definitely "adult".

I never understood why we go out of our way to "protect" children against seeing naked people, but real people in a pool of blood, nah, no problem. I think that people bloodily fighting each other for causes that I have a hard time understanding even as an adult may not be what we want children to be exposed to without control. Images of violence create a visceral reaction and I don't think it is how we should approach political problems, in the same way that porn may not be the best approach to sex, the same argument for why we don't let children access porn applies to political violence too.

The point I wanted to make is that whatever your opinion is on ID checks to access to adult content, "adult" doesn't and shouldn't just mean "porn".

[TFYS]

We are approaching a time when most of that free flowing information is LLM generated propaganda and advertising. The average person can no longer go on the internet and trust any of the things they see or read, so what's the value of such information? I would prefer the free internet of the 90s and 00s, but we're losing it even without these laws.

[dragonwriter]

> We are approaching a time when most of that free flowing information is LLM generated propaganda and advertising. The average person can no longer go on the internet and trust the things they see or read

The average person could never do that; critical evaluation was always needed (and it was needed for the material people encountered before the internet, too.) The only thing that is a change from the status quo ante in the first sentence is “LLM generated”.

[bondarchuk]

There's still messaging between groups of people who already know each other and can verify each others' online identities offline.

[ndr]

It's in the UK, EU and soon to the US.

The west is going to be less and less free.

I'm sorry I feel the chill writing this, but I hope the hackers keep the flame alive.

Hackers: keep giving the finger to regulators when they overreach. They don't get to make the future.

[wolvesechoes]

This reliance on hackers and other antisocial snowflakes in FOSS world is one of the reason we are where we are.

Political problems cannot be solved through technology or yet another forked FOSS project. They require political power, numbers and threat of violence to those in charge.

[delegate]

It's not a war.

The population (especially the youth) is anesthetized by social media, shorts, fear-inducing news, economic hopelessness, climate extremes..

In the meantime, everything is getting integrated - banks, tax systems, tech platforms. Now this age verification.. And of course, AI is being implemented everywhere so that no one can evade the big brother.

As it stands now, this Internet is no longer salvageable imo.

[Aurornis]

> Without real push-back to these dystopian laws and consequences for the people proposing and lobbying for them

If anything, I’m seeing more calls for internet regulation on HN and other tech places than in the past.

Every time something is shared about topics like kids spending too much time on phones or LLMs producing incorrect output, the comments attract a lot of demands for government regulation as the solution. Regulation is viewed as the way to push back on technological and social problems.

The closer regulations come to reality, the less popular they are. Regulation seems most attractive in the abstract, before people have to consider the unintended consequences.

The most common example I can think of is age verification: Every thread about smartphone addiction come with calls for strict age-based regulation all over the place.

Yet the calls for strict age-based internet regulation generally fail to realize that you can’t only do age verifications on kids and you can’t do it anonymously. The only way to do age verification is to verify everyone, and the only way to verify that the age verification matches the user is to remove the possibility of anonymity.

The calls for regulation always imagine it happening to other people and other companies. Few people demanding internet age verification for things like social media seem to realize that it would also apply to sites like HN. Nobody likes the idea of having to prove your identity for an age check to sign up for HN, they just want to imagine Facebook users going through that trouble because they don’t use Facebook and therefore it’s not a problem.

[squiggleblaz]

Engineers want some kind of regulation because they feel like computer systems, which they nominally control, are out of control, because of the business people's demands. They want the right to say no without having to have the consequences of saying no. But then when regulations come in, they're not about regulating business, they're about regulated interactions between people and business. And whereas the idealist sees a regulation as a chance to change things for the better, a regulator sees a regulation as a chance to preserve things as they were just before they became bad. (It takes a politician, not a regulator, to change things.)

[quantummagic]

They always start with "think of the children", but that's just the opening salvo. The wild west days of the internet are definitely behind us. We'll be lucky if we still have private personal computing in the future, or any semblance of free speech.

[akersten]

If we're to regain any ground here we need to adjust the messaging wrt terms like "wild west" - that's precisely the kind of terminology that scares the average voter into thinking the government needs to do something about this whole internet thing. We need to use patriotic and inspiring language, like "free" as in "free speech for the internet," or "safe and private" etc

[yupyupyups]

There wont be any consequences if you expect them to legislate against themselves, or handcuff themselves and throw themselves into a cage.

Let's stop beating around the bush. We all know this doesn't make any sense.

[athrowaway3z]

I'm not sure this old horror story still works. The things to be afraid of have changed too much and at a far larger scale than people then could comprehend.

The "temporary anomaly" is one of perception. It was individuals talking to individuals. In terms of volume the world has never had this much free flow of information, and its never been easier to transmit encrypted data within a group.

At the same time the problem with letting the internet be without government means it pushes digital crack to all children, and an oligarchy of (natural) monopolies tightly control certain powers through systems like "sign in with Google".

The options for companies to instead use a government backed digital identity seems like an obvious step forward if designed carefully enough.

That requires the right mindfullness of people's rights, eg the right story. I just don't think the war on the free-internet narrative from 30 years ago is up for it.

[djrj477dhsnv]

But the "digital crack" isn't what the government wants to restrict from children.

They want to stop children from accessing porn, which really isn't all that bad. Certainly it's not nearly as bad as wasting hours on perfectly legal social media and streaming sites

[deadbabe]

It's not accelerating, it's over. We lost.

[wkat4242]

We didn't quite yet. We're still here, pretty anonymous, I'm sure your real name is not deadbabe :) IRC still exists where you can just pick a nickname from thin air. And most of these things will stay, underground. It's the commercial mainstream that will bow to this, sadly.