[gspencley]

In most legal jurisdictions that I know of, kids aren't legally allowed to be able to access to pornography either. How is that working out?

The only way to even attempt to enforce these things is with government mandated age verification. Few people want that as it represents a massive violation of privacy and effectively makes anonymity on the Internet impossible.

[triceratops]

The insistence on perfect age verification requires ending anonymity. Age verification to the level of buying cigarettes or booze does not.

Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained, and most kids are locked out.

In the same way that kids occasionally obtain cigs or beer despite safeguards, sometimes they may get their hands on a code. Prosecute anyone who knowingly sells or gives one to a minor.

[pryce]

> Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained...

Ask a woman in a liquor store whether her anonymity is maintained by this scenario...?

The current liquor store approach for buying liquor is hazardous for a good chunk of people and we need to acknowledge that - even if acquiring a token somewhat ameliorates the compounded risk from presenting ID multiple times

So many of these internet ban proposals feel like someone creates a single cartoon scenario that captures ~2% of the use cases, and happily charges ahead to a proposed solution as though they've sufficiently thought about the people affected and the harms involved.

[lisbbb]

I don't see the danger of pornography, tbh. Oh, much of it is sick, sure, but violent video games are far more harmful. Would it be better to depict loving, caring relationships? Hell, yes! But there are so few of those these days.

My teenage son struggles to have any meaningful dialog with any of the girls his age. It's like he doesn't exist. The few kids who are "dating" is basically the exact scenario that MGTOW depicts--girls only go for the elite jocks and ignore everyone else like they don't even exist. Everyone is miserable. Many will eventually grow out of it, but I don't think the females will ever view themselves as doing anything but "settling" because of the nonsense programmed into their heads. And yes, social media is largely responsible for how extreme the situation has become. In the 90s, girls were picky, but nothing like now. So all that young men have left is like AI chatbots and porn and it's better to not take that away from them, too.

[oblio]

It could be designed to be anonymous.

Government runs authentication service that has your personal details.

User creates account on platform Y, platform Y asks government service if your age is >18, service says y/n. Platform never finds out your personal details.

OAuth for age verification.

[swiftcoder]

The government still knows your identity in this scenario, so it's a pretty limited form of anonymity (i.e. only suitable for activities the government isn't hostile to)

[iknowstuff]

The government then knows all the services you use. No bueno.

There are better ways to do this including zk proofs, but you gotta work against people mass reselling them. Could do some rate limited tokens minted from a proof maybe.

[padjo]

Some concerns: - government gets a list of every website that requests your age - every website has to register with the government to initiate age verification checks

Which pretty much puts an end to any notion of an open internet. But maybe a system I prefer to one where a bunch of random startups have my age verification biometrics .

[Froztnova]

Would zero knowledge proofs work here? I'm not enough of a cryptography nerd so I don't know if it would be a practical use-case.

[thfuran]

>The only way to even attempt to enforce these things is with government mandated age verification

Yes, that's what they did.