Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

jameskilton

That's the trick, it's always been about control. No-one in such positions actually cares about the children.

jmcgough

What's sad is how effective this is. Religious groups figured out a few years ago that anti-porn groups accomplish nothing, but if you start an anti-trafficking group you can restrict porn access.

cs02rm0

It's always been internet access control, there is no child protection.

baal80spam

It was never about children...

squarefoot

Access control and pervasive surveillance has been the plan since day one; child protection is the leverage. Also, I don't expect people who repeatedly hide the contents of certain files to care about children.

wewewedxfgdf

You must be crazy, who could possibly object to governments "protecting the children"?

bilekas

It's too late and never about children, simply deeper forms of data harvesting and surveillance. What makes me extremely sad and concerned is that more recent generations simply have no idea or expectation of privacy online anymore. There will never be more of a fight against all this Orwellian behavior.

HardwareLust

The entire purpose of this exercise is control. "Child protection" is just a ruse to get the stupids onboard.

borissk

The big tech is going to be one of the big winners from Internet Access Control. This will give them a more reliable way to link a user account to an actual human being - a link that can be monetized in a variety of ways. All kind of political regimes can use such regulations to enhance their control of the population. And the loosers are going to be the Internet users and small companies. The unfortunate true is IAC is coming to most countries in the world, no matter how much the Hacker News audience hates it...

cluckindan

It’s not even a debate if these controls are problematic. The litmus test is to mentally substitute the age field for an ancestry field and place the system in 1930’s Germany. Coincidently, that system was provided by IBM.

SilverElfin

I read in some other discussions that this is about social media companies being able to increase their profits and nothing else. But the social media companies lobbying for these laws are shamelessly making it look like some kind of protect the children thing. It is all pushing more ads annd getting more users. The way it works: today, social media companies cannot advertise to children under 13 under COPPA. So these companies have to do their best to guess the user’s age, and if it is possibly a child, they can’t advertise and have to lose those profits even though MAYBE the user is an adult. Now they can shift the legal compliance costs and liability to the operating system provider or phone manufacturer and not be responsible for the user’s identity. And then they can advertise much more at that point, without being conservative. This also lets them have a different experience for minors that doesn’t advertise to them, but targets them carefully to keep them as users until they are older, so they start to become a source of advertising profits later. It’s well known that Meta is behind a lot of funding for nonprofits pushing these laws under a “protect the children” thing. But now even Pinterest’s CEO is shamelessly saying parents don’t have a responsibility to manage their own kids, and is supporting all of this. See https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh... and https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/pinterest-ceo-government... Evangelist/theocratic conservatives welcome these laws because they view it as enabling and validating age-based restrictions for other things. For example, Project 2025 called for a ban on porn. And separately, the Heritage Foundation pushed age-verification for porn websites, and has openly admitted it is a defacto porn ban. That should have been ruled unconstitutional on free speech grounds, but the current SCOTUS upheld it unfortunately. They’ll next use age-based verification for all sorts of content - maybe for LGBTQ stuff, maybe for something else. In the end, everyone else will lose. If you have to prove your identity to anyone, there is a high chance this information can be accessed and surveilled by the government. There is a high chance at some point, no matter what they claim, your identity data will be hacked and sold. And of course if you can be identified online, then anything you say or do can be traced back to you, and that can be used against you by the government. Suddenly, being a protester in these chaotic times will become a lot more risky.

jjk166

The people pushing for "child protection" went to the island. It's not even about control, it's about shifting liability away from platforms so they can further gut moderation, reducing their expenses and getting away with doing nothing to stop the actual bad actors.

varispeed

The people who want to control internet access use children to achieve their means. Why these creeps get to power? Normally people thinking too much about children would be casted out of society at best.

vsgherzi

Y E S. I’m tired of hearing about child proofing the internet. We need a solution that’s not enforcing age or id verification on the os or internet itself like meta is pushing. We need better solutions and we should fight draconian enforcement with extreme prejudice

kepeko

Maybe the positive is that access control might break the illusion of privacy. Okay it's quite private in the sense that we don't know our friends browsing history but we know somebody, somewhere is collecting data and selling it to their 100 partners. Do you think there might ever be a moment when someone decides, legally or not, dump enormous amount of info, in a way that allows people to see what google searches other people did or browsing history etc? A moment when people's embarrassing secrets come into light.

plasticeagle

AI;DR It's too late in any case, the Internet as we know it will eat itself. It will be destroyed by AI, and AI agents from without. And it will be destroyed from within by stupid laws such as the ones under "discussion" in this AI-edited and AI-illustrated nothingpiece. By which I not mean the infrastructure. I mean the current crop of social media websites. The infrastructure will remain, and perhaps something better will come along to use that infrastructure.

einpoklum

But the whole point of bringing up child protection was to restrict Internet access, to police Internet content and to legitimize mass surveillance. Or do we really believe that states which condone support, fund and sometimes engage in the mass killings children are motivated by genuine moral concern for the young? ----- Still, there is somewhat of a silver lining: Perhaps this will encourage young people, and people who value their privacy, to avoid those "social networks" in favor of places where there is no age verification, 2FA with a physical phone number, etc. etc.

dlcarrier

For the US, the worst of it started in 2019, when the held YouTube liable for all content that a child might access. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_and_privacy#COPPA_sett... ) That's what pushed all of the content networks to lobby for the liability to go somewhere else.

Diffusion3166

Given that it seems Meta is commissioning these laws, I wonder if a viral open source license that explicitly fails to grant Meta a license to use or modify the software would effectively deter future lobbying for regulations which are especially difficult for the open source community to comply with.

windowliker

Arguments about erosion of privacy miss the point: that is exactly what they want.