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United States law that would require all operating systems to implement mandatory age verification is now available to read.
The bill is ironically titled the Parents Decide Act rather than the Government Decides Act. It applies to all operating systems; Windows, Linux, embedded systems, even smart refrigerators. Developers will have full access to all relevant personal data.
The bill doesn't even specify how age verification will work and instead delegates this task to the FTC, which will also specify data storage/protection requirements. The law wiould be considered in effect one year from date it is enacted and violations will be handled under the Federal Trade Commission Act.
„Child protection“ laws like this have no good justification and simply amount to destroying anonymity on the internet. What benefit does anybody get from such a law anyway? I can't see any. If operating systems are so bad for 17 year olds, why don't parents just take their kids' phones away? How does 17 year olds using operating systems create negative externalities for other people? I'm not seeing what I'm supposed to be gaining from these laws. It seems like lazy parents have teamed up with law enforcement who hate anonymous internet usage to demand that governments destroy internet privacy under the thin veneer of protecting teenagers from nothing.
If we gas ourselves up on hopeium, in theory this could be a positive step in the right direction.
Internet anonymity is already a mixed bag. If you are anonymous but make enough impact there are plenty of avenues for those who want to out you to do so. Just recently Howling Mutant got doxed. He joins a long list of 'doxxed' folks who have had their lives upended in worse ways.
You are not anonymous because people can't find you. You are anonymous because you don't matter. Those who matter get doxxed and the veil of anonymity now harms them, since they are now alone and exposed whilst everyone else is allowed to hide. If there was no anonymity people would take their rights to express themselves more seriously. And then maybe one day the 'freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences' line could die the painful death it deserves.
Outside of that there's plenty of potential utility in ID verification over the internet. Be that to do business with the bank or government offices that would have required you to go there in person, but can now be solved with a few swipes or clicks. I would in fact be quite partial to the idea that certain demographics would never see a gambling ad ever again. Which would otherwise be hard to achieve. On the flipside I'm not really sold on the utility of a low barrier of entry for kids to see porn or fall victim to psychologically manipulative 'gaming' schemes.
To put it another way: If what kids see on the internet matters so much that parents should revoke access to it, why isn't what's on there a bigger deal? We've already seen fine posts on here regarding the subject of foreign interference in media with the recent forced sale of TikTok. That, on top of the promulgation of hard and soft pornography, should be dealt with head on rather than being excused away under the guise that this is all somehow a meaningful avenue of anonymous expression whilst your ability to express your political views is a total sink or swim predicament based entirely on the whims of billionaires and the political extremists they bankroll, who can revoke your ability to meaningfully express yourself at will.
If we are to elevate the internet to be a free market place of ideas then it should be that in totality. Not piecemeal where sometimes our rights are sacred but other times not.
Theoretically your identity could be veiled to the public on certain platforms in a formalized manner, and unneeded breaches of information could be prosecuted similar to a libel suit. The big companies could now properly curate content based on a very firm 'don't show porn to under 18's' criteria. Meaning the government has a foot in the door of their algorithms. Maybe we could finally stop pretending that technology is all too complicated to legislate. And maybe, just maybe, this will lead to my YouTube frontpage sucking less. Maybe.
Now, what are the odds that OS ID verification leads to any of this? None. But the mechanisms would at least theoretically be in place to make the change. As it stands the situation isn't all that great. And I'd wager this would mostly affect phones anyway, which already have pretty ironclad ways of knowing exactly who you are, where you are and so on.
I agree it's way harder to hide than the average person thinks but it's definitely not impossible in the slightest. Even Russia and China, with much tighter grips on the Internet still struggle here. And it requires a lot of time, effort, and to some degree talent to go through the normal doxxing methods, whereas "give your ID and link it directly to your accounts" is incredibly easy comparatively.
That's never going to die because "consequences" is vague and in many ways includes other people speech. Just consider a basic premise. John makes a policy that he will insult anyone who insults him first.
John: Hi Rude stranger: hi you ugly fucker John: Ok bitch, go die in a ditch
The rude stranger has suffered a consequence over his speech. To prevent this consequence requires silencing John.
This is particularly silly but highlights an important point. People criticizing you or insulting feels bad, but that is their speech being used. Someone's speech must be suppressed in order to stop this consequence.
How about a more life impacting example?
John is a CEO of IndustryInc. RandomManager accidently hotmics "And we gotta get these stupid moron customers to accept the price increases somehow". Customers are upset about being insulted and stop buying from Industry Inc. John fires RandomManager to try to bring customers support back and RandomManager can't pay his mortgage.
That sucks for the manager but which thing should we not allow in order to prevent "consequences"? Should customers be forced to buy from companies? Seems silly to me. Should John not be able to fire RandomManager who is hurting his business then?
Freeing the manager of consequences means removing freedom of association from everyone else.
Ok how about John and Joe are friends playing pool at the bar. While drunk, Joe says "John, I really hate your wife and think she's a bitch. She's an ugly fat bitch". John ends the friendship. Joe has now suffered a consequence for his speech, but what is the solution here, state mandated friends?
Yes there are some "consequences" that are obviously BS. Violence, shouting over people, abuse of government. Those things should not be accepted. But a lot of the negative things that happen to someone socially for speech are just the result of others exercising their own basic freedoms. They insult you, they unfriend you, they fire you, they boycott you, whatever because they too are free.
My example pertained more to America. If you sign up for or log in to a website you are functionally trackable, as far as I understood things. So yeah, being hidden is possible, but being hidden and being someone that matters in discourse? I think the barrier to entry on that is a bit too high to be considered relevant.
This feels like a very clear motte and bailey.
No one employing the 'freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences' line is defending peoples rights to disassociate over someone being an asshole in private dealings. Instead they are defending exactly the things described here:
Yes, calling the bosses wife fat to his face might get your fired. Voicing support for party X whilst your boss hates party X might also get you fired, but these are clearly not the same thing. You have to see the distinction between them. At risk of sounding like a complete cardboard box: we live in a democracy! Making political statements in a democracy has to be protected. People can play their cards close to their hands in private, but limiting discourse on the public square via fear of reprisals is not a way for a democracy to function. There has to be a way to navigate that.
You see how you just went "No one is doing that, anyway I'm going to do that" right? I don't see why your boss shouldn't be able to fire you for that. At will employment is the default in the US after all. He can fire you because he doesn't like the color of your shirt, because he doesn't like that your voice sounds annoying, that he saw a picture of your lawn and thought it wasn't taken care of well.
And yet, restricting citizen's freedom of association (which in the US is an implied right under freedom of speech) via fear of reprisals is? If you don't like a company firing John for his speech then you can boycott the company for that, as is your right.
When someone is making a 'this is how I think things should be' argument, it's very annoying to receive a 'well this is how things actually are' response. We're not really playing from the same sheet of music here.
I don't see how I did that unless you are arguing that there is not a difference between hurling personal insults at your boss and publicly voicing a political opinion he disagrees with. I see that distinction clearly, and I also think that expressing political opinions and handling political disagreements is a basic and necessary function of living in a democracy. If you don't see the inherent conflict of serving your democratic duty as an active participant in the political process and being liable to lose your job because of that then I feel we are at an impasse.
Outside of that I feel like we are roaming back to my original point. And I would just directly challenge your conception of 'having rights' in America as you present them here. For example, you can't fire a person because they are black. The Civil Rights Act just doesn't allow that. So you don't really have at will employment by default so we don't even need to act like 'At will Employment' is a point here to begin with.
And that highlights my problem with this predicament. Boycotting a company because they fired an honest and good man for bad reasons is what losers with no rights do. People with actual rights just point the upholder of their rights to the person that violated them and the upholder deals with it.
If you have to uphold your own rights in the immediate sense then you just don't have rights. Like, insofar as rights are real, you have to have an external mechanism that enforces them. Otherwise you are just kind of doing what you want and calling it 'having rights'.
Ok sure, fair enough.
So if you say to your boss "your wife is a bitch" he can fire you because it's private, but if you post on your public work associated Facebook "I think my boss's wife is a bitch", he can't because it's public?
And wait, let me anticipate the "oh that's different it's political" response. Where's the exact distinction? Like extreme example but real political thing that happens in some countries. What if say, his son is gay and the employes tells the boss (or I guess, posts on his public Facebook) "your son is a freak who should be executed by the moral police"? That sounds distinctly political, which people should and should not be executed by government moral police. How about "women shouldn't vote, including your wife"? I think he should be able to find that insulting and fire you. Or hell what if they just say "I hope the president issues an executive order calling your wife a bitch". Can't get more political than your hopes of a particular policy from a politician. Maybe he's really creative and inspired and makes a troll campaign (but he plays it completely seriously) for local waterboard commissioner and while in an interview makes a point to repeatedly say "yeah, part of what inspired me to run is that my current boss's wife is a bitch. I figured maybe something is wrong with the water making her so bitchy".
How are you going to draw the lines in a fair manner, where does "politics" a topic about basically every part of life in at least some way actually begin here? This isn't some gotcha, it's an extremely difficult task to actually make a good overarching definition that isn't able to be abused. Just try with only the examples I gave alone and it'll be hard without making a convoluted mess.
This is some crazy logic, boycotting companies is your right. The government should not be micromanaging your financial decisions like that. Do you want every time you use a different gas station or try a new brand at the store to be open to scrutiny by bureaucrats to make sure you aren't "cancelling" anyone?
On a case by case basis. Like is done all over the world. I'm sure your entertainingly convoluted examples would make it all the way to the highest court of any land. That being said, I don't think they are very realistic. And you can make a mockery of any law with unrealistic examples. But those examples could still be dealt with, even if they are far from being representative.
I would personally make a distinction between political views and assertions made about private individuals in public. Similarly, political views directed against private individuals could easily be deemed to not be in line with the political process. As in, making politically unrealistic wishes of ill towards private persons is a clear enough step over the line. Similar to how saying 'In minecraft' is not actually a legal defense against the preceding threats of violence, saying 'politically' is also not a defense.
If boss' wife was not private, but a public political figure, then assertions against her would be political. But not in the context of her being your boss' wife, since that fact is not politically relevant. If it were politically relevant, and both the boss and wife are politically involved then an employee would have the right to make political statements about both.
All that being said, I'd generally side with employees over employers in any case where the working relationship between the two is not personal. The idea that an employer gets to dictate the public expressions of tens, hundreds or thousands of people goes against fundamental aspects of democracy as I see them.
The point being illustrated by me was that people with actual employment protection rights, like blacks in America, don't have to boycott things, since their rights are upheld by third parties. If your rights are not upheld by third parties then you don't really have rights. Unless you want to contextualize any ability you have to do anything in the world as a 'right', in which case our understanding of the word is not 1:1.
Is it common to have anti discrimination laws based around something as vague and unclear as "political beliefs"? I wouldn't have said it was.
"John's gay son should be hanged" vs "Gays should be hanged by the government" doesn't seem that meaningful of a difference to me.
The employer is not some sort of dictator who is unable to be left. There's tons of jobs that someone can go do, both in their field and out of it. You have the same right of association and can leave your job for the reasons you want, like "my boss has an annoying voice" or "the company had a trans pride picnic and I don't like that".
Civil right laws are largely meaningless, they only get passed when a society (and thus almost always the market of a society) are already in agreement with the general principles. Enshrining them has some effect don't get me wrong, but it's not as potent as it seems.
Market rationality happens a lot without such anti discrimination laws, like how many companies will hire illegal immigrants or with otherwise obviously fake ID under the table simply because it's more economical for them. Despite the exact opposite and almost all the laws on book encouraging hiring the expensive citizens. The Republican voting farmer might not really like illegal immigration as a concept, but he does enjoy doing better in his farm business. There will be plenty of bigots who might not like blacks or Whites or Asians or whatever, who recognize the same thing with race. Or gender. Or whatever. Bigotry has to be overwhelming in the market (and society) to overturn this. And the more cutthroat the market is, the more overwhelming the bigotry has to get.
Firing people unreasonably for their race/religion/sex/political beliefs/citizen status whatever will always be suboptimal compared to "hiring the most economical choice". Some companies might be willing to take the hit and be suboptimal, but plenty of others won't.
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