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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.
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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