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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.
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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