I think a lot of us old tech folks want to still believe in those techno-libertarian ideals of the old web. However, in order to do that we largely need to ignore the capitalistic and authoritarian ideals of the modern web.
Us not owing each other anything worked great in a prior era when people were largely correct in assuming most people were good actors. But as soon as the money and power of the internet became real, things started to turn more adversarial. The assumption of trust and lack of responsibility makes it easy for one side to take advantage of the goodwill of the other. And the technical and power imbalances inherit to the server-client nature of the web means that abuse is more likely to flow in one direction than the other.
I agree entirely. Those of us old enough to have experienced those dreams are naturally going to mourn the loss of the Internet as a place for wild experimentation because we know so much good came from it and there isn't any true replacement.
But it's become clear that in the absence of governance, standards of behavior, and rules both explicit and implicit, the Internet has grown toward tyranny and automated exploitation rather than freedom.
We need to set some rules and expectations that people can rely on, otherwise rules will continue to be imposed on us.
>If it was then this kind of solution would be being legislated for.
What's more likely a global conspiracy to get age verification passed to allow these unnamed groups to identify everyone for some unknown purpose or politicians just not understanding tech?
The way people try to pretend that there can't be any organic desire for these proposals is so bizarre and is a major cause for all these proposed solutions being so technically dubious. Refusal to recognize the problem means you won't be part of solving the problem.
You do realize that for whatever reason more and more people in government positions are on the path of authoritarian agendas? Its a pretty important topic right now. All of this privacy related stuff is happening in quick succession.
I mean I cannot believe I have to post these, but here we go:
Your argument has two main flaws. First, it relies on an inherent connection between age verification and authoritarianism that is just taken for granted as true. Meta could easily be in favor of age verification because it reduces their liability and raises the barriers to entry for potential competitors. It doesn't inherently have to be authoritarianism.
But more importantly even if that connection is true, your argument relies on the current proposals of age verification being the only way to satisfy the organic desire for protecting kids from the unfettered internet. OP gave an example that could be a compromise position that addresses the need and isn't authoritarian. Why can't you support that effort?
I can support any effort that puts the responsibility into the hands of the parent without a mechanism that advances identity verification to protect their children.
The way it stands now. this issue is being used by people in power to advanced an authoritarian agenda. Its really clear to see, if you only have the will to look.
>I can support any effort that puts the responsibility into the hands of the parent without a mechanism that advances identity verification to protect their children.
Which brings us right back to what I said here[1]. We don't have to agree on the motivations behind this push. Even if you believe this is all an authoritarian conspiracy, that conspiracy could be undermined by proposals like OP's, but instead people make enemies out of these potential allies which just further empowers the people who you consider to be authoritarians. It's a failure of basic political coalition building.
Im happy to have dialog with anyone that wants to protect children under the circumstances I already described. But if these initiatives push forward IDing people to have protection, then Im sorry you are on the wrong side of life and are involved in making the future of our society worse. I don't see you as an enemy, more misguided then anything. Im sure people are going to turn this into friends and enemies, but I don't look at it that way. I have to defend freedom under all circumstances. In most cases I support deontology over utilitarianism because I have seen how far we have slid in terms of being free as a people because we want to make everyone safe..
Taking away freedoms, for any reason, is not the answer. They make us less secure [0] and promote bad actors to make things worse.
>Im happy to have dialog with anyone that wants to protect children under the circumstances I already described.
But you're ignoring my point that your dialog is actively counterproductive when you don't engage with the root of the problem.
Nowhere in here did I advocate for "taking away freedoms" or for the age verification policies as discussed in this article. The only aspect of this issue that I have argued is that there is a real organic demand from people who want help in preventing children from having unfettered access to the internet.
The reason you see me as "misguided" is because you are refusing to actually listen to what I'm saying. And then you magnify the divide with your rhetoric implying I'm out to take away your freedom. Maybe you don't look at me as an enemy, but your rhetoric and behavior is actively repellent when it could instead be welcoming as you claim to sympathetic to the only issue I have actually advocated for here.
How am I not engaging with the root of the problem? I just see it differently than you. And thats ok. I dont think the problem is solved by id verification. This is the position I have been arguing all along and Im not seeing how my position is getting in the way of what you are talking about.
>How am I not engaging with the root of the problem?
The root of the problem is child safety on the internet.
>I dont think the problem is solved by id verification. This is the position I have been arguing all along
I have advocated for child safety, but nowhere in any of these comments have I advocated for id verification. If you have been "arguing all along" against id verification, then you must be equating all childhood internet safety advocates with those advocating for id verification.
>Im not seeing how my position is getting in the way of what you are talking about.
The equating of childhood safety on the internet with id verification is getting in the way. There exists compromises like the one OP suggested in the top comment in this thread that satisfy both my desire for childhood safety and your desire to prevent id verification. But instead of seeking that path of coalition building and compromise, you're actively repelling childhood safety advocates by misrepresenting their opinions and then calling them "misguided". You're making it clear that you won't be my ally when it comes to protecting kids on the internet because you're so worried about a policy for which I'm not advocating.
You asked me "How am I not engaging with...", I gave you a response, and then you refuse to engage with that response. I guess your behavior confirming my accusation is as satisfactory of an answer as I could expect from you.
The politicians that want to identify everyone capitalize on organic desire for these proposals in the form of fear-mongering and "Think of the children!"
Citizens that want these laws are unthinking drones who don't want to raise their children, and instead want legislators to do it for them.
Politicians that want these laws are the people who, ideally, want to track your every move online for a multitude of reasons, not least of which are censoring speech and controlling narratives.
Even if everything you said was true and there was a global conspiracy among the politicians, the tech crowd consistently denies and demeans these organic desires. We could cut the legs out from under these politicians if we listened to these people's concerns, considered actual solutions like OP did at the top of this thread, and turned these people into allies against those politicians. But instead we deny the actual desire to protect children and accuse them of either having ulterior motives or being sheep, turning them into permanent enemies thereby empowering those (hypothetically) conspiratorial politicians.
The public, and consumers in general often state a want or need for something that they don't actually want or that would harm their quality of life, it is correct to demean or deride these wants when they're identified, some aspects of human nature are amusing.
But there is a global conspiracy, a synchronised effort among western leaders to implement near identical solutions to this engineered "problem", the responsibility remains squarely on the shoulders of parents, I say this as a parent.
>The public, and consumers in general often state a want or need for something that they don't actually want or that would harm their quality of life, it is correct to demean or deride these wants when they're identified, some aspects of human nature are amusing.
Thank you for proving my point by doing the exact thing I said tech people do. Do you think that if you demean and deride enough people, the problem will go away?
Most markets have also had a wide variety of regulations. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that large retail operations would be prohibited from attempting a predatory scheme depending on individualized pricing. There's a tangible difference between one off purchase contracts and selling into the consumer market at large.
Sure, haggling was historically the standard but that just isn't the way these modern operations work. If an outdated practice gets caught in the crossfire when protecting consumers from imminent harm I'm okay with that.
Most pricing laws are built on the idea that this isn't OK. For example, I can't negotiate pricing directly with an automobile manufacturer. I have to go through a dealer so I am "protected".
And yet there has been very little about their actual priorities that have been surprising. Anyone who fell for it should do some self-reflection on why they believed those lies when so many other people saw right through them.
Does anyone else see the disconnect between how Americans talk about our history compared to how we talk about political violence of today?
How can we glorify Thomas Jefferson and teach kids about him saying "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" only to then condemn the spilling of any modern blood? Truly what is the difference between torching a warehouse of toilet paper compared to tossing some tea in the harbor?
How can we condemn one and celebrate the other without being hypocrites?
Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement.
There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well.
There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID.
Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
So the list of suspects is actually long.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.
Do you not see how this comment is actually counterproductive to the point you’re arguing? The long list of suspects, most of them being totally independent of each other is evidence of this not being orchestrated by some central group.
The fact that a bunch of seemingly disparate actors are behaving in a highly coordinated manner is evidence against central orchestration? What an absurd suggestion.
You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated, then using that to infer central orchestration, and then using that inferred central organization to support coordination.
When there is something that aligns with the interests of several disparate groups it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
> You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated
The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
> it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
Sure, as is frequently seen with the conferences and administrative bodies surrounding treaties and the like. Would you care to point out this central organizing body that a bunch of people posting here appear mysteriously determined to deny the existence of?
What exactly is your position? First you object to an alleged lack of evidence on my part, then turn around and seemingly attempt to justify the observed behavior with the argument that coordination in the open is normal and expected. So do you acknowledge the presence of what appears to be centralized coordination in this instance or not?
> The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
This is labelling the behavior as abnormal, and then basing your conclusions on it.
Are you unaware that there’s been decades of reporting on social media impact on children? It’s covered issues from bullying, anorexia, toxicity, attention issues, sleep issues, focus issues to name a few of the topics ? These are separate from CSAM, grooming, stalking, revenge porn and NCII.
What counter evidence is there against you, AnonymousPlanet, and gslepak being the same person? You're all seemingly acting in a highly coordinated manner. Would it be reasonable for me to assume you're all one person? Because a suspicious similarity seems to be the only reasoning any of you are providing for these laws being centrally orchestrated.
So if I don't answer your question, you use the fact I didn't answer against me and if I do answer, you use the fact I answered against me as well. It's hard to take your non constructive way of arguing serious. Have a nice day.
This is a very strange response. Am I not allowed to criticize the answer you provide when it doesn't actually answer the question?
For example, if I asked you who killed JFK and you responded with "It could have been Oswald acting alone or the mafia or the KGB or the CIA or Fidel Castro or a misfire from Secret Service...", you didn't actually answer the question, you just gave a list of potential answers. One of those answers could be right, but the way you provided so many answers shows that you can't actually answer the question with any degree of certainty. You effectively answered "what's 2 + 2" with "something between 2 and 10". I'm not going to respond with it's not "2+2 is not 8 because..."
They answered your question sufficiently. Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?
Some questions aren't easy to just answer, even if the answer is known to the person being asked. Some topics are supressed rather well. If you're already acting like someone who is more interested in derailing conversations than having an honest discussion, it's unlikely you'll get the exact list of names of those primarily responsible for driving this push to KYC access to online services. Especially on a website that's heavily moderated and basically a battleground.
>Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?
What question do you want me to answer that isn't some loaded rhetorical question along the lines of "What is your motivation for denying the obvious?"
And yet, it is all part of a script. The future, without naming names, without knowing names, without pointing fingers, can somehow still be known and seen. So is that a conspiracy? Even if it looks like many disparate groups, clearly there is a central script, and if there's a central script, there must be a central author of that script.
You, AnonymousPlanet, and fc417fc802 are all responding to me in very similar ways and yet I'm not accusing you of reading from the same script or being puppeteered by the same person/group. This is because I can recognize that people can have the same thought process without any active collaboration. And yet I would have just as much evidence to make those accusations as the evidence that you provided here that all these laws have the same shady origin.
I don't recall off the top of my head but in past HN threads the global lobbyists for this were named with evidence.
It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
> It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
Lobbyists don’t lobby just to lobby, they lobby on behalf of someone paying them. So this doesn’t actually answer the question, it just shifts it to “Who is behind the lobbyists?”
It doesn't matter what you answer, slg will always try to use the way you answered to argue against you, not the substance. This person seems to be only interested in derailing the conversation.
You're decrying this supposed issue, that multiple countries are all copying one another for legislation. You've repeated this multiple times in these comments.
And yet, after all this, you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you. If someone really cares they should get informed.
> you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you
You're demanding that others spoon feed you peer reviewed evidence that water is wet. As you say, if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself. I myself have no need at present for the hazily remembered details. The only thing at issue in the here and now was the absurd claim that there's no centralized lobbying effort involved.
> if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself.
I don't care. Unlike you, I am sufficiently informed about how legislatures around the world operate to know that coordination of this nature is common, anodine, and the way they have enshrined a global economy that has unlocked unfathomable wealth.
> And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism.
Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.
It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question of who is behind all this. That is why people consider this stuff conspiracy theories. You aren't analyzing the various parties and what motivates them. You're just seeing a result you don't understand and jumping to the conclusion that it's only possible if there is some unknown shadowy group behind it all. If anyone here is trying to create a "shield against their own ignorance"...
There's no requirement to name specific parties in order to make observations. Regardless of motivation it's clear from past examples that laws simply do not form across international borders in this manner. The lobbying is plain as day.
Comments like this don’t make you folks sound less like “conspiracy theorists”. It’s also a tone that tells me that you aren’t going to approach anything I say in good faith so there is no point in me trying to engage with you on the topic anymore.
It's so aggravating to have to have arguments about whether some coordinated political push is happening due to money being spent. Literally every coordinated political push, at least ones with any success, is consciously planned and lobbied for, even the ones that I support.
I don't get pretending that no one is behind it. There are definitely people sitting in conference rooms in front of whiteboards trying to come up with ideas on how to do it most effectively. But people compartmentalize so hard, some people in that room would call you a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the meeting that they are currently attending. "I just do social media for a nonprofit. No, there's nothing wrong with us getting 90% of our funding from the US government, you're just a cynic. What evidence is there that we are working on their behalf? Do you think social media is good for teenagers?!"
I'm not trying to sound like anything. I've engaged with you in good faith, articulating my view and inquiring as to why you are denying what appears obvious to me. In response you've accused me of bad faith and explicitly refused to engage.
I cannot help that water seems wet to me but if it seems dry to you I am willing to hear you out.
People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial. Our laws need to overcome those longstanding cultural standards that vary greatly across the globe and therefore laws will be different too.
It varies by country, but I would guess most political leaders didn't grow up in the era of social media, so there isn't some ingrained belief that kids actually need this stuff. And with growing globalization, it makes perfect sense that many new laws would be similar because they are both motivated by the same factors and can be used as examples for each other.
I remember a time around 2010 where I benefitted from social media, Facebook in particular. It wasn't addictive, I used it for 15 minutes at the end of the day to catch up with what foreign family was doing, we would organize real-life parties through Facebook, share photos of those events, tag each other. If you traveled internationally it was easy to keep in touch with people you met along the way.
I'm afraid we will never get to that point anymore but I do think there was a point in society where social media was a positive addition.
It could still be like that if there was no opaque algorithm and even better if there was no endless feed to doomscroll. If you only got alerts for messages directed at you and otherwise had to actively visit a person's page to check up on them. But that wouldn't be as engaging (ie addictive) and there wouldn't be nearly as many opportunities for ads or even the collection of data to drive those ads.
> People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial.
This is probably the reason why there is no unified age for drinking, because everyone came at it at different times from different place and have differing rationale including social, religious, cultural etc.
Social media is new and there is no cultural/religious rule for/against it. So 16 is the starting point someone decided (was it Australia or NZ?), and others are following since it's a good starting point. As time progresses, maybe it'll move up or down and different countries might take a different stand.
>which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America
Imperceptible compared to two incredibly loud things that most people wouldn't want built within a few hundred feet of their home. Some of the defenses of these datacenters in this thread are so poorly framed that it makes me wonder who actually wrote them.
A technologically impressive innovation that is ultimately doomed by being too loud and so expensive that it mostly benefits the rich before the costs just become too high for even that to be practical? That's the positive analogy?
I agree it "ought to be", but from a practical perspective, this often just isn't worth it at a local level. Actually determining the right cost for the externalities would take a decent amount of work and odds are whatever the "fair" value is will be enough to kill the project anyway. The developer will likely jump to some other jurisdiction that isn't able to muster up enough political will to demand a fair deal. An outright ban might sound harsh, but there are benefits to their simplicity because many of these race to the bottom deals aren't worth engaging with at any level. Let some other community gamble with the winner's curse.
Us not owing each other anything worked great in a prior era when people were largely correct in assuming most people were good actors. But as soon as the money and power of the internet became real, things started to turn more adversarial. The assumption of trust and lack of responsibility makes it easy for one side to take advantage of the goodwill of the other. And the technical and power imbalances inherit to the server-client nature of the web means that abuse is more likely to flow in one direction than the other.
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