People have been forgetting that home routers come with something called parental controls.
When my wife and I first signed up with Virgin as our ISP there was parental control turned on by default. Had to put in my credit card info to be able to flap. This was 2021ish? So before the current stupidity.
Also, it’s easy to feel like this is all being pushed by parents who just straight up refuse to properly parent their children…but it’s mostly being championed by Puritan lobby/pressure groups. They think even totally consensual, CIS/HET amateur porn is disgusting and sinful. They don’t want to see, so they’re on a mission to make it so literally no one can see it.
With help from companies and people who have a vested interest in creating a panopticon-esque surveillance state. And the rest of the people involved in passing it are too old or ignorant or paid too well by the other two groups to stand in the way of it, or to have cut out the really egregious shit from these bills before they were passed.
lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Governments know about parental controls. They don’t care. If they cared, they’d develop their own parental control software, offer it for free, and encourage it’s use. If they really wanted to get draconian about it, as they are doing now with age verification, they would pass laws to prosecute parents who don’t use parental controls with negligence.
But it’s not about the children. At all. It’s about preventing you and me, and all of us from talking to each other and entertaining ourselves. It’s about turning the Internet into TV, a one way faucet of entertainment and information controlled by the wealthy .001% where us peons can’t talk back.
These age verification laws are just the first step. They kill small forums and games like Urban Dead, and leave only sites controlled by megacorporations that can afford the age verification infrastructure and the massive corporate fines if a single kid sneaks in. Once you get used to this, it’s easier for you to accept not being able to communicate online at all, or start your own forum, or YouTube channel.
halloween_spookster@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I’m skeptical that governments know about these solutions given how little people in general understand technology. It’s a “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” situation. Ideally they should have experts available to consult with when making laws to prevent BS like this.
Sturgist@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
@lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world
The people at the top certainly don’t. There IS absolutely large swaths of the government that definitely do. Even if only subconsciously, all (or most) government workers who use a workplace computer of some kind should understand that sites are able to be blocked. They might think you’d need to be a Grey Beard of the 16th Order to set it up, but I’d wager a fair percentage have tried to go to a site and it’s been blacklisted.