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The Internet and the courts: One step forward, one step back
Two recent US decisions just happened related to the Internet, one I think is good and the other, not so much.
First up, we have Cox v. Sony, decided by SCOTUS. Sony sued Cox (an ISP) for alleged contributory copyright infringement merely for providing Internet services to people who infringed their copyrights. The jury found in favor of Sony, and ruled that Cox had in fact contributed to copyright infringement just by providing Internet access. If not overturned, this would have been a troubling precedent to set since the liability for copyright infringement would have expanded massively, forcing ISPs to clamp down even more on their users, potentially leading to (even more) mass surveillance.
Thankfully, SCOTUS reversed the lower courts and found in favor of Cox, ruling that a service provider is only liable for contributory copyright infringement if the service induced or was specifically tailored for such infringement. Since Cox did not do either in any way, it is not liable.
Second, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Youtube liable for the plaintiff's social media addiction that developed during her childhood. Her lawyers said that design features like infinite feeds, autoplay, and notifications were a substantial factor in causing her harm, while the defendants pointed to her turbulent home life and that none of her therapists identified social media as the cause of her mental health. And I also would sooner find her parents more responsible for letting her be on screens all day than the social media platforms themselves.
Regardless, a decision like this one is sure to accelerate the trend of requiring "age verification" (doxing yourself) to use anything on the Internet. The laws and courts are increasingly taking the position that the optimal number of minors on the Internet is zero. After all, everyone keeps getting sued for having underage users, but no one's getting sued for the inevitable data breaches that will happen when there's databases of people's dox floating around. If you don't want to lose tons of money in lawsuits, forcing people to dox themselves seems like the safer bet.
California has introduced age verification for all operating systems, and yes, this includes all Linux distributions, and yes, some of them are actually going to implement it. Brazil has also passed an age verification law. Apple has already implemented age verification, at least in the UK. I'm not aware of a jurisdiction that has taken a clear and unambiguous stance that doxing yourself to use the Internet is a horribly massive invasion of privacy, only jurisdictions that haven't taken a pro-doxing stance yet. Sure, some age verification laws, like Louisiana's, will get struck down for being unconstitutional, but like gun control laws, these cases will take months to work their way through the courts, and they will probably slightly tweak their laws to be juuuust different enough that any cases challenging it will have to start from scratch every single time.
It used to be that society expected parents to watch their children and monitor their Internet usage. But by and large, parents seem to have abdicated that responsibility, and as a consequence, the responsibility has shifted to the government, who have shifted it to Internet platforms, who have now shifted it to the entire rest of society, diminishing everyone's freedom in the name of protecting children. I think the biggest and cruelest irony is that, like gun control, none of this effort will do anything to actually protect children.
It’s not like I want to reinvent the wheel or something, but wouldn’t it be possible to design tablets and smartphones specifically for children, just as there are crappy mobile phones designed for old people, with a some sort of built-in set of restrictions regarding apps? With all the enthusiastic narratives regarding the digital revolution and whatnot, one would think that this is feasible.
You could technically speaking. This is what prisons do for instance, there's an obscure genre of laptops made to be used by inmates that are insanely locked down and made of clear plastic so you can't hide contraband inside.
But the final destination of any attempt to make computing two tier like this is widespread digital id based controls. It's just too convenient for state capacity not to make everyone into a prisoner if the tech exists and is made practical.
I hate this because I think I have a right both to a free internet and one where I don't have to engage with 14 year olds as if what they say has any bearing on reality. But the path to both of these at once is narrow.
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I'm sure products like that exist on the market. The problem, historically, with this approach is that parents and teachers are rarely able to stay ahead of kids who are more tech-savvy than themselves. Technological solutions to protecting children from "adult" content invite creative problem solving, but don't tend to work all that well at actually preventing children from seeing the content. Hence the more draconian age-verification approach.
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This is a position that if you told me I would've adopted 15 years ago, I'd have called you crazy. But I've increasingly come over to that side of the aisle.
Growing up in a family that always worked closely in infosec, I was always much closer than the average person to understanding the ways in which your life can be negatively impacted by tech. Over the years I've become much more taken up with the thinking of people like Michael Bazzell and some of his prescriptions for minimizing your digital footprint. I was never one of those privacy absolutist types, but I've never bought in completely to the appeal of things like social media. People I know 'always' send me Instagram feeds, YouTube videos and all the digital eye candy horseshit all the time. "Hey cousin, watch this!," "Hey dude, check this out...," "Hey man, look here and tell me what you think...;" and I always skip right over it and never view it. I don't like this kind of social voyeurism into everyone else's lives, it always seemed to play to people's vanity and negative impulses and empowered creeps to invade the cracks in the lives of others to fill their own selfish exploits.
At this point, my main issue is with how this is enforced. A world without children on the internet would be a better one. But how do you ensure children don't access the internet without doing away with any semblance of online privacy?
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I think you can agree that people overshare on the Internet while also being against the mass surveillance necessary to ensure the number of minors on the Internet is zero.
Part of the problem is that "massive amount that people overshare," people are trained into thinking is "normal."
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The fucking problem with this shit is even if you don't let your kids have a smartphone with social media apps, if you send them to school, every single friend of theirs does and they use these social apps to communicate and bond and if your kid is the weirdo without one they feel unable to function socially and hate you every day for restricting them.
I have an extremely hard time keeping this stuff away from my kid even though we're homeschooling. He does an online piano course from his tablet sitting above his keyboard. The course web site embeds YouTube video content. He's repeatedly had trouble just sticking to the course and I've had to ratchet up parental controls to the point where each video he watches has to be approved by me now. They just won't let you program YouTube to say "only show and allow this kid this piano guy's channel", nothing else
I'm on the third parental control regime at this point. Next thing to try is to replace his tablet with a locked down laptop where he can only run a pre installed web browser that force enables a vibe coded extension.
Yeah, I totally can't imagine any other reason, at all, why that would be. How could "boring and pointless bullshit" [from the victim's point of view- if this was interesting, you wouldn't be having this problem] ever lose to some readily-available distraction? This sort of thing has been stumping parents since time immemorial.
Perhaps not setting appropriate metrics is the actual problem? When I tend to procrastinate and go down a YouTube rabbit hole (or, y'know, write comments on the Motte) it's because either the time I have to complete a particular task is far longer than it's actually going to take (especially if I don't want to do it for some reason), or everyone's agreed it doesn't matter and I'm rationally deprioritizing tasks nobody cares about for stuff that's actually important (even if it's just important to me).
This is especially true when it's a parent ordering their kid to do something they really don't have much experience in themselves, so they have no idea how to set goals/metrics, meaningfully check in, or motivate progress (or have no idea that they even need to be doing those things). Which means that the task of figuring that out now falls to the subordinate, and if that subordinate isn't particularly motivated to do it, you're going to get some, uh, interesting answers.
Organically, I notice that others trying to learn songs will tend to set goals based around practice times- have this song/technique memorized in X practices from now- and the timetable imposes itself intrinsically based on how long that process actually takes. Some take a long time, some do not, but the key there is that if it doesn't get done, the next conversation tends to be "well, then what the fuck were you even doing, scrolling through Shorts for 8 hours?". Figuring out how long something's going to take is a skill that needs to be practiced too. (So's justifying it, for that matter.)
Also, here's your obligatory "trying to use tech to solve a people problem". Besides, what do you think's going to happen if you manage to accomplish your goal? I bet your answer isn't "they stare blankly at the wall for most of the allotted practice time", but I have first-hand experience in employing exactly that strategy in the Before Tech times, and they'll likely do it to you.
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Can you please explain what this even is?
True. One would assume that this should be possible in a mobile app.
Step 1: Install a browser (maybe Chrome?). Use ??? controls to make it the only accessible application.
Step 2: Create a plugin that blocks unwanted content (or everything but specifically selected content). Use natural language instructions to an AI instead of writing the code directly.
Step 3: Install that extension on the browser, and use ??? to make it impossible to disable.
Result: A laptop that can only do one thing. For example, watch a single channel's YouTube videos.
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Kids have hated their parents for placing restrictions for their own good since time immemorial. Doesn't make it ok to give up though (to be clear: I'm not accusing you of giving up, just that many parents do seem to give up these days). If social media truly is tantamount to doing drugs in terms of the harm it causes kids (as I've seen alleged), then even being a complete social outcast is less bad for the kid than being on social media.
Depends on the drug to be honest. If it's equal to every social outing including a mandatory dose of heroin, then sure, being an outcast is better. If it's more like having a beer now and then with some risk of getting blackout drunk - I'm pretty sure such harms and risks were usually implicitly accepted as part of growing up.
Sure, that's reasonable enough. My impression is that people mean the heroin end of the spectrum (not beer) when they make the comparison, but perhaps it will turn out to be more like beer.
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Social media may be the best way of achieving outcast status in 2026. I remember when MySpace was on the decline and my peers and I were first hopping over to Facebook. I was one of the guys at the tail end of that lane change and I remember getting into a messaging exchange/argument with one of my peers who I never liked. It was over the fact that I added about 40-50 at the beginning, because a lot of my family hadn't yet made the transition and I don't go around adding random people I don't know in-person. He was mocking it because he had nearly "300 friends!" and I wasn't even close to him. I simply replied, "Uh, yeah dude, I don't have 284 imaginary friends like you do..." Got blocked shortly after that. In real life, this dude had no friends because we all knew him.
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And further in defense of parents, it's hard to figure out how to square that circle. I don't have a good answer to it either. Aside from living in an Ultra Orthodox Jewish community, the balance between things like that are notoriously hard to navigate. One thing that's ironic though is that prolonged exposure to this trough of horseshit usually leads to 1 of 2 different outcomes. Either they become fully absorbed and consumed by the technology and become addicts glued to social media and everything else, or they become so desensitized to it, none of it has zero appeal to them, they get bored and tired of it and just tune it all out and barely notice it anymore; if they even did to begin with. Some years back I read a mathematics textbook that was written on the kind of "recommender systems" that Amazon uses. If you count that as "advertising" as some might, then I'm somewhat susceptible to it because I've actually found it to be useful as a sort of consumer bibliographer of related items. But in my own case when it comes to traditional advertising, I came to the original, latter conclusion and I think it's for the better. And that came naturally, not through any sort of parental supervision. I grew up during the time with there were still all these turbulent changes and things didn't settle into where they are currently.
I've often wondered for instance how the advertising industry calculates the success of it's marketing campaigns because I've 'never' thought of myself as someone who's susceptible to advertising. I do my research and due diligence in advance. Walk into the store immediately to buy what it is I already did my homework on and leave. I block out all forms of advertising. I ignore everything else without any effort. Maybe it's just a personality thing. Some cats you dangle a ball of yarn in front of and they snatch onto it and get wrapped up in the whole thing. Other cats get annoyed, get up and move and go back into hibernation mode. That was me.
The old saw about advertising is that only 50% of it works; but there's no way of knowing which 50%.
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There's a tool called yt-dlp which allows you to easily download youtube videos (including entire playlists).
You could download the "whitelist" videos to your computer, transfer them to the tablet via USB thumbdrive or somesuch, and just cut youtube out completely.
If you really wanted to be crafty, you could install jellyfin on a computer somewhere on your network, download the videos to that (as well as any other videos you want to whitelist), and then put the jellyfin client on the tablet and give him a youtube-like experience.
You could also script the download to run every day for a set of approved channels. And you could also, if you are so inclined, set up something like ErsatzTV and create your own TV channel (complete with EPG) with youtube videos, music videos downloaded with yt-dlp as well from playlists of best 80s, 90s and 00s music videos, ripped TV shows from DVDs (and not torrents, that would be piracy!), movies and even 80s and 90s ads as padding between "shows" (there's channels with lots of ads on youtube). And then serve that through Jellyfin.
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In practice, this is going to look like parents needing to sign off on their kids' accounts. Youtube wants kids viewing some stuff, most parents want their kids watching some youtube, kids want to watch youtube, etc. What seems to be the actual demand is that youtube and meta cooperate in parental controls ad infinitum.
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It used to be that a family had a single PC that was only sometimes connected to the internet, often at rather low speeds, maybe through a modem that shared the phone line with voice, and that PC (which was clunky and slow) could easily be kept in a public part of a house where it was visible to everyone what was being done on the screen, and the price of that PC meant that there would only be one in the house, and it would be shared.
Now we live in a world where kids, on their 20 minute school bus ride, are automatically surrounded by other kids whose parents have given them smart phones with unrestricted access to the internet with no adult supervision (because... school bus), and then their schools also assign them tablets to use for learning apps, class e-mail, virtual days when school is snowed out, and apps for turning in assignments at night via the camera on the tablet and wifi. And everything under the sun has a wifi connection now. The amount of devices a family has in their house that will stream youtube is surprisingly vast, if you count parents phones, and game consoles, and old recycled tablets for car trips, and... It adds up rapidly. And those devices are all super cheap, and they're all really, really hard to lock down, and they're all extremely portable. And because all their peers are always online because they've got wireless devices from sixth grade on, kids who don't have those devices really are socially excluded in an important sense.
Nothing has sat still. The technology world has absolutely rushed headlong into a totally different context than the one parents faced with the early internet.
Now, as it happens, my wife and I don't give our kids access to the default wireless network in the house, and I have a guest network on the router than I can turn on and off via browser access when class work requires it, and we currently keep the kids in public spaces in our house when they're doing internet stuff, and we've resisted getting the kids phones, although there's no way around the tablets they bring home from public school. And we have a single PC attached to our living room TV with my awesome Steam library, too, and browser access there. And my oldest is only part way through middle school. But already, we look really countercultural and, frankly, pretty controlling. It's an enormous uphill fight.
I'm not saying any of this to push any particular response, government or otherwise, to these issues. But just saying "parents should do their jobs", while true (and frustrating, I assure you), is not really recognizing how drastically things have changed, on a technology + pervasiveness level. We're just absolutely flooded in cheap wifi enabled devices that are often very difficult to lock down, especially in aggregate. And that is new.
The implicit argument that comes with the 'it's the parents' responsibility' position is that the status quo is the best we can hope for. We've had smartphones, social media, fast internet etc for years now, and we've seen what happens. Unless defenders are arguing that this is the best of all worlds given the technology that exists, then we need action beyond that taken by individual families. Whether that's smartphone bans in schools, age verification for social media and porn or whatever, if we want to move away from an anxious, depressed, isolated and screen-based childhood, then expecting every single family to unilaterally fight the flood is asking too much.
There's a reason the Amish reject technologies at a congregation-level. Doing it household by household is impossible.
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Yes, it is a difficult problem and I'm not sure if there's a solution to it. I just know that age verification won't do anything. To me, it's a coordination problem, because one household deciding to clamp down on technology use isn't going to move the needle for a whole country and everyone else is going to treat them like the Amish, so there's no good incentive for the first few hundred (maybe even few thousand) people to start increasing control over their kids that way. In an ideal society, we wouldn't have a culture of handing kids Internet-connected devices and not monitoring them one bit, but that's exactly what we do.
I still remember the early days of the Internet, when everyone was advised not to share any personal information with strangers online. Now, a lot of people and especially the younger generation do just that, and get into exactly the trouble one would expect from doing so. And now we're being told we need to share even more personal information to save the younger generation from themselves. It's all so tiresome.
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Governments around the world have wanted to implement persistent online ID for a while. Companies know this and want to use it to build deeper moats as well as maintain relationships with the government.
"Protecting children" is a huge excuse. Age verification is not what they really care about; what they want is to build a massive database of individuals, persistently tie unique identifiers to those individuals from their behavior across the internet and always-online devices, and then sell that data to the highest bidder, for everything from law enforcement to AI modeling of your likely personality and behaviors to selling you more twinkies.
Most internet users already use persistent online ID through their Gmail or Facebook universal logins and have done for years. This hasn't lead to governments using them for any nefarious ends.
Porn verification wouldn't even be a good way to do what you're claiming. People watch porn in incognito mode, and so aren't logged into their other accounts, and the age verification software almost always uses facial age recognition rather than ID card verification.
Governments that do have digital IDs invariably just use them for taxes and stuff, they're not persistent across the web.
Governments are looking to prevent kids from watching porn because...they don't want kids watching porn. Underage porn bans are extremely popular with the public (e.g. 69% (lol) support in the UK). There's no big conspiracy.
A government just recently demonstrated use of surveillance and big data harvesting to enact targeted precision warfare against a large number of political and military leaders in a foreign nation and you're saying this kind of persistent ID wouldn't be used for any nefarious ends? I maintain that this was a mistake; if any other government wasn't paying attention to this sort of thing before they sure as hell are now. The temptation is too large, I don't trust anyone with it, and government heads, as well as policy, can change over time.
Alright, fine - assuming a perfectly innocent government that doesn't want your data for any reason other than to protect children (the same way they said removing anonymity on the internet was a way to protect women from... targeted harassment...) let's talk about those with obvious profit motive who want to sell you more goods and services.
As early as 2018 I was being pitched by very enthusiastic people in closed-door meetings about the ability to build a unique consumer profile of potential customers using their entire online identity. They also pointed out that the harder they scaled and the larger number of people they had, they could further model the consumption patterns and behaviors of an individual they were targeting with reasonable accuracy even if that individual personally didn't use any social media networks or had minimal online presence, based entirely on the patterns and behaviors of those they did know and network profiling based on the people who knew that individual. They were envisioning and trying to sell us a service where we could identify every single potential customer based off their online habits or the habits of people they knew and then target those people with ads for goods, services and content specifically tailored to them. I have no doubt that this is already in use, and I'm fairly sure certain companies already have a reasonably good profile of my spending habits. I don't want to give these people any more than I already do. I don't want them to take my data and sell it, and I value my privacy. They do as well, I'm pretty sure they know I do and are willing to sell services that promote privacy to me.
You don't think that it wouldn't be a fairly easy leap to the business logic where you can degrade or enshittify goods and services for specific customers to find the enshittification yield curve for specific individuals? Certain companies have already been testing individual-specific pricing. It would be reasonably trivial to implement if you already have a picture of an individual's specific spending habits and know just how much you can gouge a specific customer. Is this a future you want - one where companies know you recently came into some money from a sale or inheritance and immediately figure out they can raise your prices 15%?
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They don't care about "most users" they care about having an eye on ALL of them, so they can keep an eye on dissidents. Facebook an Gmail are woefully insufficient for this, because you can just not open a Facebook / Gmail account, or use an alternative one not tied to your public persona.
They did already create a massive apparatus of information suppression, and expecting me to be comfortable with handing over my entire log of digital activities to these people is deranged.
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