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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 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.
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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