Age Verification Legislation

[EdgyRabbit]

The moment they ask for my ID, im out. Im fully switching to the internet archive for stuff i enjoy. I will also try to archive stuff from my favourite creators on there, as they might be lost to time due to youtubes garbage ID systhem. Plus.. theres more stuff on there!

[Spots]

An Idea I have been floating in my Mind was an expansion of the HTML Standard for example to implant an Age Meta tag, that then would be read by the Browser and block websites that don't fit the Parental Settings in the browser.

That actually already exists with the Restricted to Adults label and a lot of major sites have been using it for a long time. It would be infinitely better to just legally require adult content to be tagged like this and then expect parents to use filtering software and actually do their job as parents.

[Monoki]

That actually already exists with the Restricted to Adults label and a lot of major sites have been using it for a long time. It would be infinitely better to just legally require adult content to be tagged like this and then expect parents to use filtering software and actually do their job as parents.

I think this would be ideal.

Part of me thinks keeping parents checked out is part of the goal. Because then kids can be an easy customer base for whatever lifestyle or product is being sold.

The other part of me thinks this is insulting to parents who aren’t checked out. Saying they don’t know how to do their job as parents.

[crazyroostereye]

That actually already exists with the Restricted to Adults label and a lot of major sites have been using it for a long time. It would be infinitely better to just legally require adult content to be tagged like this and then expect parents to use filtering software and actually do their job as parents.

I didn't know that this existed looks good, maybe adding more granular control would be cool with the Label, like specific Age Groups like 18+ 16+ 12+ etc. How we used to do For Movies and Games. But there is a distinct lack of a component, and that being the Browsers reacting to the Label. This is what we should Legislatively enforce.

[starbreaker]

I don't want to attribute malice where it can be reasonably explained with Incompetence. Especially in the places like the UK or US where there doesn't exist the Pre existing Infrastructure to do any sort of Accurate Privacy Preserving Age Verification. As unlike the EU, they don't have a digital ID program that has been going on for years, including Member States which have similar Digital IDs implemented for even longer.

When it comes to politics, once is incompetence. Twice is malice. This is not the first time governments have tried to censor the internet.

An Idea I have been floating in my Mind was an expansion of the HTML Standard for example to implant an Age Meta tag, that then would be read by the Browser and block websites that don't fit the Parental Settings in the browser.

The porn industry is way ahead of you. Ever hear of the RTA (restricted to adults) label?

[crazyroostereye]

The porn industry is way ahead of you. Ever hear of the RTA (restricted to adults) label?

Nope, just learned about it in this thread, and as I said in my Previous Post, it's a cool thing there is just the Lack of enforcement by the Browser of that Label. Without that, it's just useless.

When it comes to politics, once is incompetence. Twice is malice. This is not the first time governments have tried to censor the internet.

Then why use Third Parties for Age Verification. If the true goal was surveillance then provide you own Age Verification Solution, that only you can control. But for example the UK uses third Parties for this Purpose, who in their Privacy Policies state they Sell that Data. So your Advisories can also purchase that Info. That is what lets me believe its Incompetence then Malice.

[Symberzite]

Call me conspiratorial, but I genuinely doubt this is to "protect the kids" or whatever. There's been an entire generation that grew up seeing goatsee (pls don't google it) and only in anno deus 2025 they decided to do it?

My take is that because the internet is now drowning in bots (thanks tech companies) they want to verify who is an actual flesh and blood human for national security reasons. That and the entire adware monetization model of the internet stops working if it's just bots viewing content made by other bots.

Then again, a friend of mine said that the average politician is a 800-years-old and tech illiterate, so it's probably some dark power manipulating them. Again this feels very... iffy.

[starbreaker]

Call me conspiratorial, but I genuinely doubt this is to "protect the kids" or whatever. There's been an entire generation that grew up seeing goatsee (pls don't google it) and only in anno deus 2025 they decided to do it?

It's never about the kids, and I know about goatse. Anybody who comes to my website from Hacker News gets redirected there. LOL

[Symberzite]

In all honesty, the first thing that came to mind is Sam Altman (the OpenAI guy) trying to pitch a biometric data collecting service that scans your eyeball to verify people from AI bots that he himself unleashed onto the internet. It's almost admirable to pitch a solution to the problem you yourself have created.

But yeah, it is just... strange to out of the blue have the entire Western world move in the direction of continental Chinese style internet. The thing is, the little I know about countries that do have digital id laws (ala South Korea) is that they rarely stop crime, extremism or do anything really.

My mind's racing trying to square the circle of why they are doing this.

[warlock]

Boy oh boy, I remember when this future was what we were all calling "the worst case scenario" when SOPA was first introduced. Guess I should have known better than to think that something like that bill would never make it through.

From what I've seen, as far as Itch.io and Steam are concerned, their blocking/censoring of "NSFW" content is due to pressure from payment processors. Mastercard and Visa hold the right to refuse to pay platforms if the platform is deemed "unsuitable," which forces these platforms to block content. Source - Steam

This is, in turn, because of conservative interest groups pressuring and lobbying payment processor companies. Source - CBC

I suspect all the user verification ID is part of this broader conservative push to "sanitize" the internet, though I suspect these two major shifts happened to line up pretty close instead of being directly related. All of this is due to a rightward shift in the current governmental body of a lot of western countries, including the UK and US.

Personally, when this hits the US I'm going to take it as my excuse to finally duck out. Personal sites may survive the sweep, but I suspect the better option will be solutions like tildes and other pubnix-likes. Most people I know won't make the jump, hell I'm sure most of my friends will probably just roll over and accept the ID requirements, but I'm not going to cross that line just to watch youtube or whatever. "Adult" content has frequently ended up including anything related to trans/queer rights, which includes a vast majority of my interests and communities, so there won't be much left for me when these rules go in place.

[PurpleHello98]

I really don't know how to feel about these laws. In my head, at the barest conception, I think "Oh, wow, something to protect kids from getting unwittingly exposed to porn, great!" because unwitting porn exposure when I was a kid on-line traumatized me and still messes up my relationships with men to this day. But then there's the privacy ramifications, and trans people being lumped in when that's got nothing to do with anything, except that some anti-porn people are hard-right transphobic evangelicals, and it just turns into a sh-tshow. I really don't think there's any way to win in this arena. I agree that parents should be in charge of what their kids can see on-line but there's always going to be ways to sneak behind your parents' backs, circumvent filters and everything. (And honestly I think society might be healthier if porn just poofed away even for adults, but that's neither here nor there.)

[grubbyfox]

i'm too stoopid to understand all the web lingo lol, but i hope (and believe) that indie web/oldweb/hackers/non-platform webfolks will somehow find a way to hang out online in a way that will make the gov seethe and rage because they cannot get their fingers in it.

and "luckily" these government people are dimwitted non-tech boomers, so most likely they wont know about the tons of software that exist to chat with people (or people will be creating them faster than they can take them down/sieze them.)


i'm also uh not in the EU, so i have no idea what the future brings us here. maybe we will have to follow suit, but so far, there's nothing in the media about it (peculiar, isnt it?).

[Symberzite]

i'm too stoopid to understand all the web lingo lol, but i hope (and believe) that indie web/oldweb/hackers/non-platform webfolks will somehow find a way to hang out online in a way that will make the gov seethe and rage because they cannot get their fingers in it.

and "luckily" these government people are dimwitted non-tech boomers, so most likely they wont know about the tons of software that exist to chat with people (or people will be creating them faster than they can take them down/sieze them.)

My government has been doing some pretty insane crackdowns on most non-state funded platforms. Just because the average politician is tech-illiterate doesn't mean they can't find a blunt solution to the problem. For example, block platforms that do not comply of fine them an insane amounts of money until they implement some kind of measure. It's pretty obvious that within the near term you'll need a valid ID to just post anything on the web.

While I hope P2P (Peer-to-Peer) networks will still exist, you'll need to either jump through hoops to access them or they simply won't be a viable alternative to software that the average person uses for communication. You'd be surprised how tech-illiterate the average person is, especially in Western countries. Idk, I grew up with the Edward Snowden scandal and my impression was that the government was spying on you, but they had a sophisticated system put in place to do so without being noticed. This wave of web censorship seems like a swatting a fly with an anti-aircraft gun.