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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.
If you want to start a social media company based on the premise that the users are verified using government IDs, by all means do so. If you want to tell your kids that they are only allowed to use such media, by all means try. If you dislike porn, I hear Disney runs websites which are rather porn-free. By all means lobby Microsoft to add Mandatory User Age verification to Windows Server.
The point being that you compete in the marketplace of ideas. Plenty of companies build walled gardens and gilded cages in the internet. Even the companies which verify identities can generally decide how much they trust operating system and if they require remote attestation of some TPM chip certifying that the video feed used for ID is actually recorded by a tamper-resistant camera.
But to constrain the marketplace of ideas you would have to demonstrate that the options you dislike are actively harmful, and you have done no such thing.
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