In case people no longer remember, when China started to require websites to register for a license before be allowed to operate, it was for "protecting the children" too.
This simple policy then goes on to silence most individual publisher(/self-media) and consolidated the industry into the hands of the few, with no opportunity left for smaller entrepreneurs. This is arguably much worse than allowing children to watch porn online, because this will for sure effect people's whole life in a negative way.
Also, if EU really wants "VPN services to be restricted to adults only", they should just fine the children who uses it, or their parent for allowing it to happen. The same way you fine drivers for traffic violation, but not the road.
And if EU still think that's not enough, maybe they should just cut the cable, like what North Korea did.
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc).
I could miss some things from memory, but RKN originally had much less power back in the days, they were just trying to execute court orders - it started actually being self-sufficient censorship agency in ~2019
But proper curial oversight stopped with the Lugovoi law in 2013, after which RKN could block directly based on orders from the General Prosecutor's office.
This is very up to chance. Sometimes the VPN works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's fine on the home Internet, but fails on the cell data, sometimes it's otherwise. And it is fine if you're somewhat tech savvy and okay with tinkering with settings, but a huge pain for the older relatives.
Yes, indeed, it is still possible. Right now RKN introducing new DPI capabilities at TSPU(govt filtering hw/sw stack mandated at ISP) - proactive host probing/scanning and mandate for russian services to check and report VPN users hosts. I.e. you use e-shop app and it will report you Nehterlands VPS IP if detected, including split-tunneling tricks)
Won't they just be able to identify the traffic at his local internet provider as being suitable for a VPN usage match and send 'law enforcement' over?
I'm sure you're able to drive faster than the speed limit as well. The issue isn't whether technical circumvention is in the realm of possibility. The base issue here is that even so called 'democratic' governments seem to be copying the authoritarian playbook when it comes to cracking down on privacy online.
But you are asking logical questions. You are thinking and talking too much for a World citizen in 2026. "Reasoning" is a reserved word for chatbots now, so we humans are not allowed to do that anymore. We can only obey like a bot and pretend all the lies they tell are the truth.
BTW I live in Turkiye where the government banned ALL the adult websites around 2008. Even as an adult you can't access them. This year they are banning VPNs, introduce age controls and ID verification COORDINATED with the rest of the world. Also banning some games, control social media, and basically make it legal to control and track everyone on the internet. What a coincidence that similar attempts are simultaneous in many independent countries.
And no, children have not been really protected in Turkiye since 2008.
Grab a SIM-card from Bulgaria with roaming enabled. Internet is routed through the Bulgarian ISP even when you are in Turkiye. Full internet access, no VPN required.
Until the three representatives from Bulgaria and the ones from the other EU countries win out lobbying for ChatControl and expand it to VPNControl too.
You must be an American? Only Americans act like they get to define what the rest of the world calls places. It’s Gulf of Mexico. Only a country of idiots would call it gulf of America.
Do you see anyone making Koreans call it Sea of Japan? Americans can call it whatever they want as long as Americans never try to lecture others what it is called. Deal?
Oops, someone forgot languages evolve! Otherwise you must use Turkye, one of the Middle English spellings.
The United Nations agreed to their request, it’s a minor thing to let people spell it the way that was requested. You don’t have to, but others can. Languages evolve.
Twitter/X is a company, it calls itself whatever it wants, and is likely registered somewhere under a specific name. Okay, people don’t call it X, the same way people pronounce IKEA weirdly or refer to vacuums as hoovers.
Language is a malleable, artificial construct. What’s your point? That some people are stuck in their ways? Because the comment I was responding to was appalled that someone dares use the modern spelling for a country.
I have never heard someone call Belarus White Russia, notably any of the Belarusians or Russians I know. I have no idea why someone would do that. Of all the hills to die on...
The name "Turkey" has been in the English language for many centuries. It's a bit of a tall order to suddenly demand that everyone start using a different name for the country. Imagine if England suddenly demanded that everyone call them Aengelande.
The government decided to do this because they're embarrassed that a bird has the same name as the country. Ironically, the bird is named after the country.
It's pretty arrogant for a foreigner to tell me how to spell his county name in my own language, which doesn't even have those letters in an alphabet. All while adding -stan suffix to my country name in their language.
Without me getting into the specific issue, that's false. Languages evolve by how they are used, regardless whether who uses them is native speaker or not. All languages who have been at some time used "universally" in larger regions evolved reflecting that reality.
This is a genuinely dumb take and you should feel foolish for even thinking it.
Incase you dont, consider the concept of telling an Austrian that German is a foreign language for them. If this concept confuses you, I can get wikipedia links.
Thank you for telling me how I should feel! I will take it to heart and next time I'm in any doubt over how I am feeling I'll ask myself "how would LAC-Tech expect me to feel right now?" and change my feelings accordingly.
Funnily enough, on the HN zeal to prove you wrong about this, posters who dont know know about this topic dont actually realize Turkey dont give a damn about the Anglicanized name outside diplomatic context
You always hear the argument "protecting the children", because anyone oposing the regulation/laws can be labeled at best "exposing the children to danger" or at worst "pedofile". So as a consequence at best the oponents of such regulation/laws should not be listened to, or at worst they should be put into prison.
The excuse has to be something nobody can appear to be supporting (pedophilia, terrorism, nazis, etc.). It's not only an appeal to emotion, it's also a false dichotomy, a loaded question, guilt by association.
Others look at this recipe and can't help but notice its effectiveness. Eventually nobody is beneath pulling this kind of logic, even if they were the ones crucifying it just a few short years ago. The weaker the leader, the more likely that that they forget where they wrote down those principles of theirs and resort to this crap.
Right? I was just thinking that Maine looks to be electing someone who had nazi tattoos, and it would seem pedophilia is one of the few things both parties approve of at least in deed.
> The excuse has to be something nobody can appear to be supporting (pedophilia, terrorism, nazis, etc.).
If this actually works then it should work in both directions, right?
Example: Many websites are malicious or adversarial, therefore anything enabling a service to discern whether the user is a vulnerable child is a boon to website-operating pedos and needs to be eliminated. The law should inhibit predatory services from being able to discern the user's age, to protect the children.
The FATF guidance actually state that if your purchase a VPN license (shows up on credit card bill) you should suspect of being pedophile by your bank staff:
> In case people no longer remember, when China started to require websites to register for a license before be allowed to operate, it was for "protecting the children" too.
Indeed I do not remember this, nor can I find corroborating evidence that there was much of an effort to justify the requirement to the public at all. As far as I can tell, the government simply decided that they needed more control over the internet, so they made a law to give themselves more control over the internet. https://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2000/content_60531.htm It has no special provisions limited to children that only later got extended to adults. (Meanwhile, restrictions on how long children may play games continue to only apply to children, AFAIK.)
If they want to protect children, shouldn't they sterilize everyone?
Every child born, regardless of wealth will inevitably suffer injury, illness, and psychological setbacks.
Therefore, the best way to protect them would be not allowing people to have children.
By the way, not having children is also more eco-friendly, because an infinite series simply converges.
I wonder if I’ll see this ridiculous scene in my lifetime.
> By the way, not having children is also more eco-friendly, because an infinite series simply converges.
This one isn't actually accurate. Younger people have longer time horizons (i.e. aren't expecting to be dead as soon) and are therefore more likely to support policies like electrifying transportation and generating power from lower CO2 sources, and policies get enacted when they have majority support, so causing the population to skew older by reducing the number of children is ecologically very bad.
In theory. In reality the number of young people concerned about climate change is high, but the number of those willing to then not take a airplane for a few days of vacation is pretty low in my experience.
So supporting policies, "that somebody should do something" sure, also my generation thinks like this and the older one. But supporting policies that also actually affect themself, different story.
Because there is also the effect of doomerism. If the world is doomed anyway, then I can at least enjoy my vacation while I am still alive.
> In reality the number of young people concerned about climate change is high, but the number of those willing to then not take a airplane for a few days of vacation is pretty low in my experience.
Probably because air travel is something like 2% of CO2 emissions, driving long distances also emits CO2 so the actual reduction is more like 1%, and people understand what a cost/benefit ratio is.
Meanwhile they're significantly more likely to do things like buy an electric car or hybrid or install rooftop solar, which makes a much larger actual difference.
> But supporting policies that also actually affect themself, different story.
Who is more likely to support voting to fund car chargers, working people who are tired of buying gas or retirees who want to use that money to increase government retirement benefits?
> Because there is also the effect of doomerism.
Doomerism itself comes from being in the minority.
I would support air travel taxes even though I’ve used a plane 5 times this year already.
Just because I don’t believe in voluntary action doesn’t mean I wouldn’t accept society-wide policy. I want impactful societal action, not self-harm disguised as feelgood ecohobbies.
This problem can only be solved by coordinated government intervention.
They should just mandate 1 spouse should stay at home (working remotely or not working) or you must hire a full-time nanny. I'm only half joking. If your kid has enough unsupervised time to be watching porn on a regular basis, wtf is going on?
The solution is obviously to force CCTV inside homes, with data analyzed and hosted in a government cloud. If you are against this proposal, you support child abuse.
And no, this money couldn't be used to improve the life of families.
Worth remembering that eugenics was the smart idea among many intellectuals in the earlier 20th century. The fascinating list of eminent adherents include J. Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill, T. Roosevelt, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, Herbert Hoover, J.H. Kellogg (of corn flake fame), Oliver Wendell Holmes, GB Shaw, Sidney Webb (early socialist, co-founder of the LSE & the Labour Party) and William Beveridge who created the British National Health System (NHS). Apparently Hitler wrote "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.". (Mein Kempf).
It is definitely not really "for the children", when legislation is aimed at all adults, and not specifically for parents. It is parents who should be responsible for the actions of their children and given the software tools to manage their online access. This arguably can be done with government sponsored and specific help for parents; software, websites, and shops with IT personnel.
These measures taken by the EU and other government entities has always been about surveillance, censorship, control, and eliminating freedom of speech and association. People need to keep calling out this continual deception and attempt to erode freedoms.
Ursula von den Leyen has been pushing internet blocks in Germany for the sake of the children since 2009. Which is when "Zensursula" nickname has been coined. You don't need to look far to find the same thinking by the people in power.
>Ursula von den Leyen has been pushing internet blocks in Germany for the sake of the children since 2009. Which is when "Zensursula" nickname has been coined.
And then in a completely democratic mannner, Europeans said "that's who we want leading us".
It doesn’t stop being democratic. It’s just a scale from more to less democratic. America’s founding fathers were skeptical of democracy, so they provided for the president to be elected by the Electoral College, which was originally appointed by state legislatures. It’s still “democratic”—just less so than a direct election.
American people went to the polls to vote(or not) for Trump, Europeans didn't go to the polls to vote for Cenzura. Kind of a big difference on the democracy scale.
You know, if Politicians, Law Enforcement and Military Personnel are included and affected by all these anti-privacy laws, I'm all for it (not really). Let their daily corruption come to light by the opposition exposing all their dirty laundry (because of course they'd used the data against each other) and vice-versa over and over... and that's not gonna happen because we don't live in that world where laws apply fairly to everyone.
It's amazing that they are spending billions on "think of the kids" problems, yet in many countries of the EU it's very hard to find a decent children playground in the city center.
I'm quite sure that if you asked parents, they would rather have the playground than the surveillance.
You shouldn't have to be an "entrepreneur" to have a website. The idea that the only useful/interesting things to say are those that are profitable is a big part of the problem we find ourselves in.
The simplest solution is perhaps to simply imprison any children found using a VPN until they reach 18, then the state can exert total control over their access to information and they can be safely released into unmoderated society on their 18th birthday.
> And if EU still think that's not enough, maybe they should just cut the cable, like what North Korea did.
I'll make a similar comment I made on another thread: we saw a thread with many upvotes hating on the cyber-libertarians... We all know the EU institutions are ran by cyber-libertarians and that it's cyber-libertarians making such research and decisions right?
Pick your fight brothers. I don't think spending your time hating on the three John Galts of this world is a worthy fight. You may even turn out to be more morally aligned with the John Galt of this world than with the people running the EU institutions (and North Korea).
The former cyber-libertarians are running the tech unicorns now. Ofc they would prefer you see them as John Galts lol. But they aren't that and they will defend freedom of cyberspace only as far as it aligns with their power and profit.
> The same way you fine drivers for traffic violation, but not the road.
Eh - my new car has an EU mandated speed limiter in it that takes over the cruise control. It uses a combination of GPS and vision to determine what speed limit to apply. Only slammed the breaks on on the motorway to drop from 120 to 80 KM/h erroneously 4 times in one journey last week.
Much like the oft maligned Google PM that releases/deprecates another chat product to get their promotion, some commissioner somewhere in Brussels managed to make the world a better place with this too.
Do you have a single link or other piece of evidence to substantiate this? I’ve never seen, nor can I find in a search, any evidence the ICP license scheme in place for that past 26 years in China has ever related to children in any meaningful sense.
It has the ring of BS. Why would an authoritarian government in a country with no free press or free elections feel any need to justify a speech regulation with a fig leaf? They openly restrict speech.
An authoritarian government needs excuses too. China even claims to be a democratic country. North Korea even has the word Democratic in its name. "Protecting children" is a common excuse China uses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_erotic_very_violent is a famous example of them trying to justify internet censorship under the name of "protecting children".
> In case people no longer remember, when China started to require websites to register for a license before be allowed to operate, it was for "protecting the children" too.
People don't remember because it didn't happen and the license wasn't about protecting the children. But it's so convenient to just blantantly lie on the internet nowadays, isn't it?
Just like the title of this article blatantly lies about "EU" doing something.
One of you ought to find out what really did happen, and tell us. I can only do the lame thing and quote Wikipedia:
> China had no such legislation until 1997. That year, China's sole legislative body – the National People's Congress (NPC) – passed CL97, a law that deals with cyber crimes, which it divided into two broad categories: crimes that target computer networks, and crimes carried out over computer networks. Behavior illegal under the latter category includes, among many things, the dissemination of pornographic material, and the usurping of "state secrets."
The problem with hyperbolic comparisons is they tend to shut down the conversation. Yes this law is stupid and should be stopped. No, the EU is nothing like NK.
Not remotely at full speed. This is not a law, and is not in any way being enforced. Bad ideas get proposed too often, but usually they get rejected. I expect the same will happen here, although we should absolutely remain vigilant.
I do share your concern for policy moving in the direction of NK, but the EU isn't moving there nearly as fast as for example the US.
Portrayed? Have you seen the news at all in the past year? The US is descending into fascism really hard. Closing your eyes to it is not going to stop it.
If your world view is based on "alternative facts", then I agree discussion is pretty much pointless. If the US isn't descending into fascism, it's only because it's already arrived there.
I'm not denying that the EU also has rising fascism, but they're not in power the way they are in the US.
Parents can protect their children. Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet. This doesn’t affect the free exchange of ideas that my fellow countrymen enjoy.
Governments getting involved absolutely, unequivocally will be used to clamp down on the free exchange of ideas.
That wasn't the point i was asking for an argument for. What I wanted to know is how age verification is worse then allowing children to watch porn. To make that argument.
> Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet.
Are they above the age of 16? Because then you're either Amish or out of touch.
If you want the logical approach; the premise you're suggesting you want people to argue from is faulty.
The argument kicks in at a slightly deep level. Age verification is unrelated to allowing children to watch porn. Someone needs to make an argument showing that age verification would lead to blocking porn, and that argument seems to be impossible to make (age verification is a much lighter standard than the bans on torrent websites, for example, and torrenting is still as easy as it ever was). To block kids viewing porn there'd need to be a - probably global - system of censorship that exerts total control over what people can POST and GET on the internet. The likes of which we have not yet seen and would likely have catastrophically negative political consequences.
Age verification will be implemented as identity identification. And that means anything you read or write or watch or say will be tied to your identity, registered by the government and other organizations, and used against you as an individual.
Do you understand now? Or will you only understand when you get fired from your job and they won't tell you the reason?
> Age verification will be implemented as identity identification.
Thank you for bringing an argument.
I want to start by tackling your argument head on. What if it's not though. What if it's implemented by attestation and signatures rooted at your local national government? Nobody will be able to tie whatever you watch or write to your identity, because they won't have it. To my understanding, that's what's proposed here, and that won't feasibly lead to any of the spooky consequences you're predicting.
There's another leg to it also. "anything you read or write or watch or say will be tied to your identity" is already true right now. Google is already, at this second, tracking my every move online and using it against me in a targeted advertisement campaign to change my spending habits, but my political affiliations too. If you're truly afraid of that outcome, I believe there are much more prescient and immediate things you should oppose than this.
> signatures rooted at your local national government? > Google is already, at this second, tracking my every move online
Apparently you haven't figured out yet that these two are partners. The government restrictions are needed in order to allow other players to perform correlation tracking and deducing your identity.
> Nobody will be able to tie whatever you watch or write to your identity, because they won't have it.
This is untrue in the light of what I said above. The proposed scheme lacks any proof of immunity against tracking and deducing identity. I haven't seen anything like a proof being discussed, while an honestly implemented scheme would require a long and well publicized discussion of the means of protection - to make sure it cannot be abused for political reasons.
The lack of such a discussion is actually a proof that the purpose of the proposed scheme is precisely abuse.
> there are much more prescient and immediate things you should oppose than this.
We can oppose more than one thing at a time. All of these privacy invading measures should be opposed as strongly as possible. Companies like Google should be broken up by the government, the parts should not be allowed to collude with each other, and there should be laws preventing the kind of data collection they do without full transparency, user control, and ownership.
I realize this thread is a half day old, but porn is like the least concerning thing I prohibit my child from consuming off the internet. I grew up on a farm, animals work just like we do. There is obviously some messed up stuff some people find enticing, but youtube kids is way more damaging than even the weird stuff. Kids mostly have standard adult disgust filters. Ytk and similar addictive feeds bypass that with things that are far more subtle.
There are ways to do age verification without tying your identity to the content. A site could direct you through a proxy to the government's eID server with simply the request whether you're over 18. Because it's going through an anonymising proxy, the government has no idea what site you're visiting. You login to your eID, which confirms or denies that you're over 18. The porn site only knows what porn was watched and that the person watching is over 18. The proxy only knows someone was visiting the porn site at that particular time. The government knows who you are and that you were visiting a site at that time, but not which site.
> There are ways to do age verification without tying your identity to the content.
That's wishful thinking. The site would log that they sent you to verify your ID with your IP and a timestamp. The proxy server would get your identity with your IP and timestamp. Those two can can be linked. The government would know exactly who you are while also knowing where you came from and when.
Either the government would monitor the proxy or they'd just be running the proxy themselves or forcibly taking it over Room 641A style to log everything going in and out.
There is zero way to verify your identity to a website without trusting some third party with that information. There's no one in the US who is trustworthy enough or immune from being controlled by the US government so you'll always be vulnerable to having your identify exposed and it being used against you.
The best suggestion I've heard so far was scratch off cards that could be purchased anywhere in person, with cash, after presenting ID. The ID isn't logged or scanned, just manually checked by the wage slave at the counter. Even that isn't without challenges though since the cards would have codes that would likely be traceable to batches and where they were distributed to/purchased from which means that information can be checked against surveillance/facial ID/flock cameras to find out who bought them, and they can also be resold/shared online/exchanged/stolen/generated/given to others which means they won't be very effective at identifying individuals or keeping kids from seeing adult content.
The truth is that the entire point of these age verification laws is deanonymization, censorship, and control. Any theoretical scheme we might come up with that wouldn't allow for abuses will never be implemented for that reason.
Obviously there needs to be a desire to set this up responsibly. A government that doesn't care about privacy at all can force whatever they want. But the EU care a lot about privacy. They're got strong data protection regulation. Having sensible barriers in place can protect them from overstepping. The proxy obviously needs to be independent.
I don't understand why porn is such a problem and an excuse. There is so much genuinely horrifying stuff on the internet - including gore, pictures and videos of all kinds of abuse, but the problem is always with people having sex on camera for money...
>I don't understand why porn is such a problem and an excuse.
Because porn is the most taboo things in public, even if a lot of people use it at home. Nobody will come and defend liberal porn access because then everyone will call you a gooner or a pedo. It'll probably be the end of your political debate.
Which means porn access can be weaponized without any political opposition. It's the perfect scapegoat to remove online anonymity disguised as "age verification".
Yes, I agree, my point was more about why is sex such a taboo, when there are things out there, that are genuinely worse. But I guess it's a bit too wide of a topic to have a productive discussion.
I think the important part is that parents talk with their children about the nature of porn. It's unavoidable that they're going to run into it at some point, and I think it's important that they understand that's not what real sex is like.
I did catch my son watching porn when he was 13. We talked about it, I blocked some stuff at my router (hardly comprehensive, but mostly to make it easy to avoid the thing he was watching), and then stopped worrying about it. He's 17 now. I'm sure he knows how to find it if he wants it, but I also trust he's able to interpret it responsibly. He seems like a well-adjusted kid. I worry more about his gaming addiction, but it doesn't seem to be interfering with school anymore.
I don't have kids yet, but I remember what it was like as a teen. Now from the perspective of the adult, all that stuff about how porn supposedly damages young person's view of what real sex is like was exaggerated. In fact, porn ended up being a pretty decent educational experience for me. Definitely filled the gaps that the "responsible education" left behind. On the other hand, as a young boy I saw some very drastic self-harm pictures online and it's been with me since - almost 30 years later I still remember.
re: gaming addiction - my parents were obsessed with me being "addicted". Now, as an adult, I don't care about games anymore. Everything I have I owe to computer skills and English. What my parents didn't want to see (or couldn't?) was that at the time games were the only interesting thing to do. We were glued to the screens mostly because everything else sucked.
You're the one that needs to argue the presence of harm, given you're the one arguing we need to create a surveillance dragnet to shield certain age groups of humans from witnessing how their species procreates.
The default state is that humans procreate via sexual reproduction. You need to argue why we need to take action to hide this, especially given we let children witness other far more brutal activities from the human species like violence.
The argument I am asking him to make is the one about how age verification is "much worse" than "allowing children to watch porn".
If your argument in favor of that is that watching porn isn't harmful to children, then I don't understand what all that superfluous waffling about china is doing in there.
Surely someone claiming it's arguable should be willing to make that argument.
For me it's not that it's reproduction. Film that shows sex is not an issue as I see it and I don't know anyone that has developed serious addictions to sex in Hollywood film. However I know several people, family members included, that have absolutely obliterated their childhoods and early adult years by becoming addicted to porn. They were groomed by adults online from a young age and, although their parents tried to stop it, kids are sneakier and they got around it, exposing themselves to some truly dark things. It is not easy for families to recover from having dealt with a child with serious addiction issues.
I think it's pretty silly to argue that systemic protections are ineffective and overreach whereas the efforts of one or two parents should be enough and are the correct level of enforcement for the protection of children. The parents of the people I know went to extremes to protect their children and they were mostly unsuccessful.
Sounds like the people you describe were outliers with some preexisting conditions, and probably shouldn't be used as any sort of baseline or point of comparison.
Just to add my perspective, I am one of those outliers who is still going to therapy for porn/sex addiction that started in adolescence. Age verification wouldn't have helped me because addiction wasn't my main or only issue - I also had significant sources of stress owing to my upbringing. I could have just as easily been addicted to drugs or alcohol because of those stressors, or used a VPN. Either way I needed some form of stress relief beyond what any teen ought to need, and those were the options I saw.
Combination of abuse and unfettered access to drinks/drugs/Internet is way worse than either one alone. At the same time I think the issue of bad parenting is a) not one people talk about out loud because of stigma (we can attack tech CEOs all day for pushing addictive products but anyone can become a parent and none of them will stand to be called the "bad" one) and b) not amenable to much change save for a global in-house surveillance panopticon. Yes we can choose to place trust in parents to protect children from Instagram and PornHub, but consider that some parents just... won't. Neither can we force them to. What then?
I wouldn't think that since people who don't suffer from these issues outnumber those who do suffer, that makes this not a real issue. Consider the victims of opiate addiction, alcoholism, or sex trafficking. Are those situations so fundamentally different? How many people does one have to know with tragic childhoods for it to be a problem that people take seriously?
The EP paper appears to be highlighting the existence of a debate regarding VPN.
Relevant quote:
"Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place. The Children's Commissioner for England has called for VPNs to be restricted to adult use only.
While privacy advocates argue that imposing age-verification requirements on VPNs would pose significant risk to anonymity and date protection, child-safety campaigners claim that their widespread use by minors requires a regulatory response. Pornhub and other large pornography platforms have reportedly lost web traffic following the enforcement of age-verification rules in the UK, while VPN apps have reached the top of download rankings."
Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs, but nowhere in this paper is "the EU" stating that VPNs need closing.
These dimwits (and I don't just mean those in EU) seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn, and are ready to mess with internet infrastructure for that. That's a depressing manifestation of aging society
> seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn
no, they want to pretend this is the issue, so that pervasive monitoring or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized. It is to serve the state apparatus, rather than any actual protection.
If it is possible to "pretend that they want something reasonable", it means that there is something reasonable somewhere.
Maybe some want more control, but most certainly not everybody.
> so that pervasive monitoring
If you haven't gotten the memo, pervasive monitoring already exists. To sell ads.
> or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized
For age verification, it's possible to do it in a privacy-preserving manner. Now people spend their time complaining about the idea and claiming that all who disagree are extremists, so it doesn't help. But we could instead try to push for privacy-preserving age verification.
Are you calling me a corporate apologist? For one, corporations want less regulation.
"Being a hacker" does not mean "being stuck in the 80s", IMO. If TooBigTech cryptographically controls everything, it becomes harder to hack. Are you aware that the biggest restriction against jailbreaking stuff is that it was made super illegal... because it helps corporations?
You open with corporations want less regulations then give an example of corporations using law to protect their interests around jailbreaking? Just like they did with copyright/IP rules and the million rules around cars
You should ask the DIY diabetes community what they think of FDA regulations preventing modifications of medical devices.
Being reductive about this stuff is not a helpful framing.
Is that how it went? My feeling is that more and more people are realising that social media are terrible for the children (well, for everybody, but children we want to protect). Therefore more governments are looking into preventing children from accessing social media. Therefore social media companies are trying to lobby for whatever is better for them.
For Meta, it's better to have age verification than to downright ban social media.
In my experience they DO want more regulation. Regulation that helps them. The automobile’s industry was lobbying for years to have all kinds of things mandatory. They invented lots of standards and pseudo standards. At the end they shoot themselves in the foot.
what i personally don't like about privacy-preserving age verification is the single subsequent law change that would criminalize individuals for "improperly" doing age verification.
it'd be so easy to do, and would immediately make obsolete any measures taken digitally to preserve privacy
It's not really about kids looking at porn, it's about tracking everyone else and making it easier for state surveillance and corporations to identify people.
Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny.
But how to make people accept it? Tell them they want to expose kids to gruesome tentacle porn, or else they'd support this. Few adults are willing to admit they even look at porn, let alone argue that this is an important activity that needs to be protected, which it is.
If you think that there is a need for new technology to identify people, I suggest you wake up and start getting informed about surveillance capitalism.
There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already.
Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that.
Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse.
People who are actually interesting, are often aware of that fact and avoid surveillance at the moment. You can use tor/i2p, proper VPN setups, VMs, alternative mobile ROMs and other tech and cut most of the fingerprints, trackers and identification. Pretty sure the trash from state agencies doesn't like that.
But the current push from all sides to provide id for everything and remote attestation through Google and apple will make the alternatives very hard to use as it basically cuts such people from the economy altogether.
Need is a very strong word. I'd call it a desire. Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved. What they want to do is to plug in a private corporation separate from whatever service that is likely to be more loyal with the state apparatus than the service, or else it is easily switched out for another.
And corporations are having issues discerning bots from people without making access to their services a fuss or dependent on possibly idealistic and troublesome open source projects, like Anubis.
It's truly, absolutely, not about "age verification". If it were about protecting kids from harm they'd take money from corporations post factum that are offending. Instead they're preparing to spend a lot of money. You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US. They couldn't care less about kids except for obscene or profitable purposes. It would be weird for them to be cosy with epsteinian networks of power and at the same time be mindful about the wellbeing of children.
> Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved
You vastly underestimate the current state of surveillance capitalism.
> You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US.
Go in the street, and ask a bunch of random people: "If there was a way to prevent kids from accessing stuff that is bad for them, and it had no downsides. Would you want it?". I'm absolutely certain that not only fascists will say they would want it.
No one is doing it that way though. Also to be truly privacy-preserving you cannot rely on anything that requires any specific OS (especially Android or iOS) as every single OS requires some compromises to privacy.
The only privacy-preserving (effective) age verification is asking user if they are over 18 and requiring that they answer truthfully under penalty of perjury. Then prosecute the kids who claim they are over 18. For reason or another no one seems to be pushing for that option.
Well it exists in Privacy Pass, which is deployed in production. And there are countries that are currently actively looking into privacy-preserving age verification. I don't think that "I keep saying that age verification fundamentally leaks your ID, which is wrong, but it's still valid because nobody will notice" is a good argument.
> The only privacy-preserving (effective) age verification is asking user if they are over 18 and requiring that they answer truthfully under penalty of perjury.
I disagree, I think that there could be a sane debate around ZK age verification, if we could elevate it to that.
There are a lot of things that most people in the street want that aren't even on the road map to happening, so you have to ask yourself why this thing (which isn't hardly anyone's top motivating issue) is gaining traction.
> this thing (which isn't hardly anyone's top motivating issue)
Do you have kids growing up with social media?
My experience is that parents with kids growing up with social media generally care about whether or not social media are bad for their kids. And generally, parents try to give kids a smartphone and access to social media as late as possible, generally when "everybody else has it" and it feels like it becomes counter-productive to make an outlier out of your kid.
I wouldn't say nobody cares. If anything, I think most parents would care a lot more about limiting access to social media than about privacy. It's pretty obvious that nobody gives a shit about privacy.
My argument is: it is possible to do privacy-preserving age verification, and that technology is already deployed (look at Privacy Pass). We should acknowledge that and stop claiming that the age verification issue is the same as the E2EE one, because it is NOT.
And then we could maybe have a constructive debate about whether or not we as a society want that technology. That would be more interesting than "if I keep yelling that it's fundamentally stupid, maybe people on the other side will start believing it".
You're still just stating your opinions. What do you mean by "it is possible"? Are you sure there are states that are privacy respecting enough to actually be able to, or have all the relevant states broken down walls between government agencies that would shield citizens from secret surveillance and registers?
No, I'm talking about cryptography. That is, maths.
When I say that it is possible to encrypt a message in a way that only the receiver can read it, and the server relaying it cannot, it is not an opinion. I am stating a fact. Zero knowledge proofs are maths, too.
> What do you mean by "it is possible"?
I mean that there are maths that do exist that enable it. There is code that is already written that does it every day. It does exist.
But nobody can be arsed to spend a few minutes getting informed before complaining. It's not just cryptography: people who are very vocal against 5G usually believe that "it boils your blood" or some variant of it, people who are very vocal against vaccination usually have absolutely no idea how it works, that's just how it is. It is frustrating, I guess I just have to accept it.
Saying "it's not possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner" is like saying "it's not possible to deploy 5G in a way that doesn't burn people": it is at best uninformed, possibly just manipulative. Sure, it's possible to burn someone with a strong enough radio signal. But the fact remains that it is possible to deploy 5G in a way that does not burn people, and 5G is nothing special in that regard (it's just "electromagnetic waves", which is a well-known physics concept).
There would be a sane debate to have around 5G (e.g. ultra-consumerism or whatever), but I have never, EVER heard it. The 5G debate is "uninformed people claiming it boils your blood" versus people who find it useful and rightly don't believe the bullshit claims of the first group.
The age verification debate is "uninformed people claiming that it is impossible" versus people who find it useful, and can rightly dismiss the claims of the first group, because really, it is possible.
I don't see how any of these grudges of yours are relevant to the question I asked to try and put you on track to make an argument I'd expect to move us in a fruitful direction.
Believe me, in some EU countries (like my country Poland) people are very sensitive for this kind of bullshit.
Last two times they tried to push other censorship/tracking laws (claiming as always "we have to, EU is making us") there were mass protests in every city and town.
In my own town of 5k people there were several hundred (500 people at least, probably more). And the previous govt backed down.
This topic seems to be coming back everytime certain countries (Denmark etc) hold the rotating EU presidency. Our current PM is certainly in the same EU clique that wants to push this so much, but it's an extremely unpopular position and he is already leading a weak minority coalition govt. It wouldn't take much to topple him, so he will not do anything like that (unless he is convicted people are distracted with some crisis, but that is where normal people come in. To keep watching what is being smuggled in).
I wonder why do voters in those countries that propose these laws tend to allow this to happen again and again.
It's because it's not about the opinion of voters, but about existing political powers that want to retain their power.
No matter what you (as population) say it will get implemented. If you don't, then they will put sanctions on Poland, withdraw financial partnerships, etc. Like with migrants, they are going to be sent there, even if Polish people vote against.
No matter if you are in favor or against, raising the topic will just make you socially be isolated or even legally punished in some places.
Sad for democracy and free speech.
EDIT: clarified about migrant policy and the decision of countries to choose or not
I think you are confusing democracy with anarchy. There is tons of free speech in Europe, and it is the most democratic of all countries that are alternative. UK is still very democratic country. The generation of politicians from zero rate era had gotten carried away on certain topics (defence, immigration) and now we have to deal with this. they also have undermined public trust by acting the way they did in covid, to an extent that any new pandemic is likely to be way worse just because no body will trust the government again for a long time.
But there is a problem with kids today having pretty easy access to all kinds of nasty shit on internet, and it isnt like it was in 90s and 00s. 10 year olds on social media is fucked. I dont really care for blocking internet on anything, yet it does appear that simple age verification is necessary for access to certain services.
most people are just super mad that they wont be able to watch porn or their favourite show thats on netflix or whatever. BUt thats not what the article was about. Read a little bit. Comparing EU to fucking Russia is insane here.
my personal opinion is it’s an all or nothing thing for immigration. you either reduce entirely for all groups or it’s racism and unfair treatment. everyone deserves an equal chance
>you either reduce entirely for all groups or it’s racism and unfair treatment.
Racism would be restricting immigration over skin color. What people want, and a lot of countries have, is immigration based on merit system: education, skill, income, criminal record. There's nothing racist about that.
There's something in-between that could work: allow everyone, kick criminals permanently, and give a path to permanent residence to others, or something like that.
I just made it softer (though I never mentioned race but economic migration), still can be too sensitive so let it be, just my opinion (I am in Eastern Europe and there the views are rather harsh, compared to Germany or France or Sweden)
You havent said anything wrong about immigration. People who misunderstood you are racist themselves as they have dismissed cultural issues of your country and tried to impose their own views. So dont listen to them, they are just ignorant at best.
Poland has a fresh memory on communism and censorship. Sadly the alternative to your current PM is PiS, who banned abortion, so basically christian conservatives with some fascist ideas, not very different than the ones currently running the US.
To the EU regulators: we don't need another Stasi, we already have Google and Meta to worry about, thank you.
Also, to regulate in my native language is just a nice way to say the f word, if this conversation is about porn.
The rise of authoritarianism? Inequality? Revival of geopolitical "realism"? Decrease in empathy and holistic thinking? Increasing willingness of the general population to engage in political adventurism? Accelerating resource consumption (and decelerating resource stocks).
And if you consider none of those "real" problems, I know some people seem to have forgotten about it, but what about climate change? Given the half-life of CO2 and methane, that's a problem as "real" as they get.
There are real problems and they are huge but the solutions to them are very unpopular. So that's why political parties resort to this kind of distraction politics. Blaming immigrants, LGBT people etc. Or simply causing other problems by bombing random countries for no reason.
Because nobody wants to limit the big corporations polluting the world and exploiting the population, tackle climate change with more than some hollow measures. Because people will be annoyed when it affects them and that means political suicide.
So they manufacture other problems, ones they can control and point the blame to groups that have little voting power.
Adolescents, or kids? Would you say it's completely stupid to want to stop kids from watching porn, or accessing social media?
Did you grow up with free streaming platforms? Pretty sure many adolescents were accessing porn before those, though it was slightly less accessible.
I personally don't have a definitive opinion about porn (I feel like young kids obviously shouldn't have access to it, but it shouldn't be illegal to adults, but I don't know where the limit should be), but I feel like making it harder for kids to access social media makes sense.
I dunno, you have experience being a kid, right? Young kids are just not interested enough to look for porn, not to say figure out how to use VPN to access it. Lax restrictions like we have today are enough to stop porn from being forced on children who are not interested in it
The title is also the exact title for that paper’s chapter.
You are right at pointing out that the paper is overall presenting the subject in a balanced manner, unfortunately it seems a bad choice was made when it came to that specific sentence, that gives a venue for it to be fed in the outrage machine.
In that specific sentence the source is cited (via hyperlink). So even if you read it out of all context you can still find out the source is UK's Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza who said it, not "the EU" (whatever that means).
For this "story" to gain legs, someone must have pulled that sentence out of content without mentioning the source and then added some misleading context for the outrage.
Even the, it's incredibly vague at best, equivalent to "The USA said that", which only makes sense in a context where the relevant spokespeople are well-defined (such as a UN assembly or something), but who is the general spokesperson for the USA or the EU?
Usually things like these are qualified like "the Department of Defense of the USA stated X".
But you single out just one paper. If you include all paper and discussions the picture is super-clear, and the title is not misleading at all. This has to be said.
> Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs
The word choice is quite revealing. You write "regulate VPNs". To me this is not "regulation" at all - it is restriction or factually forbidding it. It is newspeak language here if we dampen it via nicer-sounding words. It also distracts from the main question: why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?
> why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?
Live sports, they’re already assaulting internet infrastructure in various EU member states (eg. La Liga forcing Spanish ISPs to block cloudflare IPs during matches). With this in mind it seems less a case of surveillance state and more a case of corporate state capture.
I think all the identity verification schemes should start with the beneficial owners of companies. Governments have been lobbied to allow complete anonymity for the wealthy that own businesses doing questionable things while regular people are going to have to show id to buy food.
Yep... and to make it worse, nobody is trying to push them towards looking at privacy-preserving age verification: instead technologists try to convince them that they just shouldn't regulate anything. Which... may not work so well.
As someone who lives in a jurisdiction which does require such disclosure: it is a significant inconvenience for small businesses, and no benefit to the general public.
Do small businesses in your area have complicated ownership structures that it's significantly inconvenient to disclose the one family that owns, for an example small business , a plumbing repair company with 4 vans and 6 employees?
They might? If they don't and it is trivial to identify the beneficial owner, why is it necessary to create a requirement to disclose? The practical experience is that people are quite bad at this sort of requirement, that may well be a source of problems and that on aggregate making it harder to do business has a notable impact [0] on general prosperity. Don't needlessly put barriers in front of people who create wealth.
It isn't a stretch to imagine that a small business owner literally doesn't have enough time in their life to maintain their own health and run their business. There are some pretty grim stories out there, I can tell one based on a friend of mine who was working ... I think 70 hour weeks. Sounded rough. It isn't actually crazy to say they may not have an hour free to figure out what form they need to fill out and where to file it, or that they'd be too sleep deprived to get it right. Assuming that this thing is the only thing they need to disclose and there aren't any other pieces of paperwork that need filing (which we all know there will be).
Sure if they have to they'll probably figure it out in most cases, maybe it is trivial. But the businesses where a straw broke the camel's back don't exist any more to point at as evidence. It is hard to know.
Lots of small businesses are operated from home. Their business information is scraped, transformed into personal information, sold to spammers and scammers, and in some cases abused in an automated fashion along with thousands of others.
Registering a phone number with the official company registry is sure to get you a scam call within the hour. People will come up to your house later to sell you power contracts you don't need, phone numbers you never wanted, and they will lie through their teeth to forge your signature if you don't agree. If you're unlucky, you'll be fighting a handful of scam companies in court within the first year, charging you thousands every month, because B2B contracts don't have the kind of protections customers have.
The only way to live a somewhat safe life as a small business owner is to have a dedicated phone number you never answer and a dedicated post office address where nobody lives.
These kinds of requirements made a lot of sense thirty years ago, but nowadays, with billions of people able to abuse every bit of information you publish instantly from anywhere while you're asleep, it makes a lot less sense.
In theory this documentation can be used to prevent scams and crimes, but actual enforcement of people's identities has become a problem, and the criminals have plenty of unsuspecting family members, homeless people, or mentally handicapped adults they can pressure into signing papers.
You get extra spam. Any data that ends up on those public lists will be used to spam you. Some websites will also correlate all the data they have on you too, so you can get that spam at home too.
Basically, you have no privacy if you start a small business under these kinds of rules.
Your personal info becomes public because it's attached to the business information. This can include phone numbers, emails, full names, home addresses etc. All accessible online by anyone, including spammers, scammers, swatters etc.
Well, the problem is all the bad actors. Why don't you post your full name, home address, email address, and phone number right here? You "do business" too, right?
Should everyone in the world then be able to have access to the information I mentioned just because you work for someone?
The people who really want to stop VPNs are commercial streamers, especially for live sports. Regardless of state, or governing party, it always comes back to money.
Is there a notable difference between these two in most places? There _should_ be but in practice it feels like more and more places function closer to an oligarchy than whatever form of “democracy” they espouse to practice.
The EU is losing around €50 billion every year to the fraud-scheme dubbed the VAT carousel (or MITF). The fix would be ridiculously simple, starting with an EU-wide VAT-ID scheme and a modicum of cooperation between financial ministries.
Not one policy maker has ever seemingly cared about this. But VPNs! That'll fix the budget and demographic crises of European nations, for sure.
I'm curious to see how the EU will maneuver it's new long-term financial plan when none of the members can even pay the membership fee soon.
Governement should force companies to give parental controls tools. Gaming companies like Nintendo and Steam do that, I can create a kid account with parental controls.
Social media companies (e.g. Meta, Snap) are the first that should provide that but they don't.
Band and severely punish systematic violations of privacy.
Regulate the poison first, not the access to it. All this age verification nonsense is an admission that some platforms knowingly harm their users. And instead of fixing the issue by cracking down on the proverbial crack, governments make everybody's life worse.
I remain hopeful that one day, humans will regard the online advertising companies with the same scorn we do the tobacco industry and may they be ashamed and disgusted at our inaction.
> Doesn't mean that it's equivalent to giving them free access to those consumables.
Why do people on HN always need to look at things as a Boolean state? It’s entirely reasonable to have some preventative measures but acknowledging that there are ways to circumvent them and accept that as a reasonable conclusion.
Things don’t need to be “all or nothing” ;)
> Source?
I grew up pre-WWW. Literally lived and breathed the points I’m making.
But don’t just take my word on this. Ask anyone of a certain age and they’ll tell you the same: they either tried cigarettes or knew lots of kids in school who smoked under the age of 16. They had access to alcohol under the age of 18. And pornographic content was easy to get hold of under the age of 18.
The age at which they gained access and the frequency of the usage depended greatly on their upbringing.
> It’s entirely reasonable to have some preventative measures but acknowledging that there are ways to circumvent them and accept that as a reasonable conclusion.
I totally agree. That can be used as an argument in favour of age verification, though.
Parents cannot be responsible for what other children can do.
If all the children use social media, good luck preventing your kid from participating. "It's okay, just be completely disconnected from everything they share between each other, it's not important to socialise, you can make friends when you are old".
The problem with social media is that it's not okay for one kid to be disconnected. What we want as a society is to prevent them all, so that they are all in the same situation.
Again, you’re talking about things in a Boolean state.
Our kids have access to social media, but we also know what they have access to because we check their phones periodically.
This is a far better approach than an “all or nothing” approach because we are giving the kids the freedom to learn how to use these tools maturely. But without removing any safety nets for if/when our kids (or any other kids in their social circles) fail to use such tools responsibly.
That’s called “parenting”.
Censoring access to tools, either via government regulations or over zealous parenting, doesn’t teach children anything. Whereas allowing kids to learn to use the tools but being around to support and help them grow when mistakes are made, is precisely what responsible parents should be doing.
And that’s the same approach you should take with learning anything as a child. You give them guidance and allow them to make mistakes but be there to support them. Kids don’t learn to ride a bike from telling them “bikes are dangerous” then suddenly when they’re 16 handing them a bike and telling them to ride it to colleague. So why are you treating social media like that?
> Again, you’re talking about things in a Boolean state.
I am not, so either you don't understand my opinion, or you manipulate it because it's convenient.
I am not, AT ALL, saying that we should make bikes illegal to kids. But some things make sense to me: we should not sell cigarettes or alcohol to kids. "Go ahead my son, you're 13, you should make your own mistakes: try smoking for a month like your friends, and then I'll explain to you why it is a bad idea" is not how I apprehend "parenting".
I am actually saying that it is nuanced, and that it is difficult to know where to put the limit. Should cocaine be allowed to kids? Cannabis? Cigarettes? Social media? Bikes? Chocolate?
> So why are you treating social media like that?
Maybe you think that social media are like bikes, and that's your right. I think they are closer to drugs. Maybe you think everything should be legal (drugs, killing, ...) and that "parenting" is the solution to all, I don't.
Like cigarettes, the message is "you should never do it, but when you'll get older it will be your choice to do that stupid shit". That is obviously not how I treat bikes.
The social media problem isn’t going to be solved by treating it like cigarettes. It’s solved by teaching kids how moderate their use of it. And that only comes with practice. So banning it for children and then expecting them to use it responsibly once they have access is unrealistic.
I am not sure if you genuinely don't see what you miss or if you purposely ignore it because it helps your argument.
Nobody says "we ban it for children and then expect them to use it responsibly". Just like for cigarettes. It's never responsible to smoke, it's just that we as a society choose to let adults stink and ruin their health if they want to. But for kids, we a society believe that they are vulnerable and may smoke without realising how stupid and unhealthy it is, so we want to protect them until they reach an age where it becomes harder to justify preventing people from taking those stupid decisions.
For social media it's exactly the same: the goal is to protect the children while they are vulnerable, until they reach an age where it becomes harder to justify. Not that many (most?) adults are wasting a big part of their life swiping utterly stupid stuff on their smartphone, but banning social media for adults is a completely different discussion.
The thing is, if a kid is the only one in their class to not have a smartphone or to not have access to social media, they are in an uncomfortable situation and that puts pressure on the parents to give them access to those, so that they can conform. A big part of being a kid is to conform: being an outlier is a risk. One reason for age verification is to prevent enough kids to access social media, such that "the norm" is suddenly not to have access to social media anymore.
You can disagree with that, but at least you could acknowledge the argument instead of going around it and talking like if there was absolutely no way a sane person could imagine that banning social media for kids could ever be constructive.
What does national security even mean anymore? People are using this term for basically everything these days, as if saying "national security" is somehow a justification on its own.
What "national security" implications are there with VPNs?
> What "national security" implications are there with VPNs?
"Foreign agents" communicating in an untraceable way.
All internet communication is wiretapped by default unless you use a VPN to a rival jurisdiction. (Where it's also wiretapped, but presumably the interplay of state actor interests comes up in the "foreign agent"'s favor.)
"National security" has long been their favorite cheat code for 'do what I say, you can't question it, damn it!'. The boy who cried wolf has nothing on the old man who cried national security.
To be replaced by the Irish tax department making direct deals that are essentially the same. But ONLY for specific companies (principle: big multinationals don't pay tax at all, local companies get big tax raises. Irish companies are dying, multinationals are moving to Ireland)
In case anyone wonders: this means the FANG companies don't pay tax in Ireland if they hire enough people in Ireland, which has famously high income tax. It is, in other words, effectively a massive tax increase on the employees while actually reducing total tax income in the EU compared to the "double dutch sandwich".
Note that Ireland signed at least 2 international treaties that they weren't going to do this (OECD minimum tax treaty, EU tax treaty). Of course, there are no consequences to this.
The response to is that EU is exploring company-tax-per-transaction which is so incredibly bad in the massive administrative burden it will generate. It's not final, but it will mean that for every transaction done companies will have to keep (PER transaction) pieces (plural) of evidence for what country they happened in. Every single transaction.
Lots of governments give tax exemptions to selected industries (film comes to mind) or even companies (Foxconn/TSMC); I don’t support this behavior, but I don’t see what makes Ireland special in this regard.
And the answer is simple: because countries sabotage each other's tax income when they can, even within unions (like US or EU, hell I'm told it even exists in Russia).
And with mobile capital, like multinationals, they can.
Ireland violated international treaties, multiple, to do this. Oh and they call it a huge success (despite that this will obviously suddenly crash and burn when other countries either block it or give better deals).
Oh and it cements the power of American multinationals over local EU companies, when the Irish government publicly and loudly claims they intend the opposite, and for reasons I don't understand, people seem to actually believe them.
Just the fact that it takes NGOs and journalists to uncover tax evasion practices. The governments and tax offices aren't looking. CumEx was a scandal in 2017, and despite being known since 1992, has only recently led to just a handful of prosecutions.
And CumEx is still being gleefully practiced by some in the upper echelons with smaller values. Literally no-one cares if you're rich and connected, apparently.
Why? Isn't your age verified when you renew your drivers license? Purchase something on Amazon?
When I was a kid, child programming and commercials were heavily scrutinized. Now any kid can access porn, violence, and scams on the internet. That's a blight. Not age verification.
Broadcast TV had a very simple solution to this problem: Only air the not-for-kids stuff at times of the day when the kids are already asleep, i.e. late in the evening or at night.
It was still the job of the parents to set the bed times etc, but at least this was something the parents could actually control.
And for pay-per-view stations with actual heavily violent or pornographic content: Yes, they were absolutely age-gated, usually via a PIN.
This is correct. I think the difference is that the PIN actually is an effective tool that parents can use to keep their kids from watching this stuff. It's also default-deny as the PIN is pre-set, and the parents would have to make a conscious efforts to allow viewing.
Im contrast, the internet is default-permit: Everyone can access everything, unless the device is specifically set up to block it. Setting up such a block has the risk of causing massive drama with your kids, and they fill probably quickly find ways to circumvent it anyway.
This is why I find the "it's the parent's responsibility" calls so hypocritical: The whole idea behind the internet is to make it as hard as possible to block things. But suddenly we expect the parents to do exactly that? How?
(All that independent of the point that the current push for age verification really seems like a disguised push for control. But that doesn't mean there isn't a real problem. Both things can be true at the same time)
Before the Internet you had to work fairly hard to get a Playboy centerfold where the model just had her breasts out. Now you can effortlessly find endless depictions of anything, including the most depraved sex acts you can possibly imagine. The ease of access and breadth of content available to kids today makes it qualitatively different than when we were kids.
That does not, of course, mean that age verification laws are the appropriate solution. You could even argue that it's not a problem that kids have access to all this stuff (though I don't think I would agree with that). But you can't just hand wave it away by saying "we looked at porn on paper when we were kids". The situations are not at all the same.
How can you define a tax loophole then? Since there isn't a thing you can do called a "Tax loophole", but rather a collection of otherwise totally legitimate practices, just used as an optimization, they are impossible to define, and as such, be scrutinized. It's a neverending whack-a-mole...
I have a question that's been going through my mind -
Why is age verification connected with identity verification?
I understand why the former is not possible with the latter, but my question is -
Whichever entity is responsible for the verification can just pass on the age verification confirmation without passing through any of the other details, right?
Am I mistaken here? Because if this was possible, I could still go ahead with using the VPN.
This seems to be what "double-blind" verification is doing:
> The report highlights emerging approaches, such as “double-blind” verification systems used in France, where websites receive only confirmation that a user meets age requirements without learning the user's identity, while the verification provider does not see which websites the user visits.
It's a question of blind trust in your government to respect this, when they themselves control the age verification apps, at least in the EU who wants to impose its own system and not rely on an autonomous third party.
It is cryptography. Just like you don't have to blindly trust Signal with end-to-end encryption (their client app is open source), it could be implemented in a way that you don't need to blindly trust your government.
> Why is age verification connected with identity verification?
With the EU's current approach, disconnecting the two is the exact point. There is no third party, the government ID you already have can be used to verify your age directly with an online service.
You are right, it is possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. Feels like most people being very vocal against the idea don't know about that.
At least most complaints I see here are assuming that age verification means tracking.
Too bad, there could be interesting discussions about privacy-preserving age verification, if people just bothered getting informed before complaining.
We already have privacy preserving age verification: the website asks for your age (or just whether you're over 18), and lets you through.
There's no issuing party to collude with to deanonymize users, no hard requirement on owning a Google- or Apple-vetted smartphone, and generally no way to identify me besides my choice of random numbers.
You move past that, and people rightfully tell you that your scheme outright breaks privacy, or that it makes too many assumptions or is too complex to easily verify it actually preserves privacy.
> You move past that, and people rightfully tell you that your scheme outright breaks privacy, or that it makes too many assumptions or is too complex to easily verify it actually preserves privacy.
Encryption is too complex to easily verify it actually protects your data. Still you use it all the time without even knowing it.
From a tech perspective it has been a solved problem since about a decade ago, via DID (decentralised identities) and their Verifiable Proofs.
The EU digital wallet framework is built around those, and your suggested scenario is a first class citizen.
It is now moving from the academic/research world, to the political field, and feedback/pressure from both commercial groups and political agendas is muddling the field.
Here are some links to canonical docs, you can easily find high quality videos that explain this is shorter/simpler terms to get a grasp of it.
Buying alcohol online without having to show a website or a delivery driver my social security number is a challenge that needs solving. Same with picking up expensive parcels from package drop-off points in my country.
You can debate whether setting up such a system for things like social media is a necessity or desired in the first place, but being able to show someone a QR code that verifies my name and age without exposing all kinds of other details about me is extremely useful.
If any EU government people are reading this, I'd like to send you a short message:
Please stop thinking about the kids on the internet. But here's a brief list of things you must work on with higher urgency:
- taxing more large corporations,
- taxing more ultra-rich people,
- funding EU-made (open source) tech and infrastructure,
- let parents spend more time with their kids so they can actually protect their offspring and keep them safe from predators, more than any stupid law you think you can devise can do,
This! More taxes and - yes - more state-controlled tech! Wait. Why stop there? Let’s just bring back the SED and the Stasi too. Also, prevent people (the rich? yeah!) leaving Europe too with big walls [1]! I love your ideas comrade! LOL. Seriously, you should read more history books (and read it to your kiddos while you're at it, please). Peace.
I don't think that from my comment anyone can infer that I'm opposed to reducing general taxation. I'm, in fact, in favor in increasing taxes for who owns too much, not against reducing taxes to population with lower income.
Still, more tax burden for companies won’t make eu more competitive against the rest of the world. We need to dramatically cut down all the regulations, have a true one market, open capital market. I am still very much pro EU, but it needs to be reformed.
Honestly, I don't think the EU problem is taxation. Really, there's a long list of things that have higher precedence over that, for example, not being so immigration-adverse.
I don’t know where you live, but generally EU’s governments are much more in support of migration than their citizens. The big corporations want that cheap labour and they won’t pay the secondary cost.
Governments already have everyone's ID, including DOB. They say that the problem is non-adults accessing adult sites and services. So therefore, the sites need to know that users are over 18 (or the selected government age).
There should be a standardized government ID service/API that allows a person to let it disclose their age (or other user selected information) to a requesting site/service. That's all that is needed if the government ID service has appropriate 2FA and security.
Both the request and the response can be appropriately anonymized so that the government doesn't know the site, and the site doesn't know the person's identity.
Why isn't this a thing yet? As far as I know, no one has proposed it.
EU people are the poorest people of our world. Living in false pretense of being "free".
The fancy pot on this fancy stove took a long time to reach boiling point. So long that the little frog inside did not even notice that it is the main course. Sometimes its too late to jump out of this pot.
Feels like its state vs man nowdays, worldwide. Don't let them mislead you.
Some EP commitee writes a report about some UK (not-EU) person stating "VPNs are a loophole that needs closing".
> A loophole that needs closing
[Some argue] that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well.
People keep looking at the consumer privacy vpns , but there's a huge field of commercial vpn usage for a broad spectrum of tasks in the european union. Point to point tunnels connecting two sites into a single network. Allowing access to (corporate) resources via laptops and mobile devices. Fixing the one way nature of crappy internet that most people are forced to work with these days (or simply never realized), etc etc.
Basically if you want to do any sort of remote work, I'm not saying you're necessarily using one right now, but the odds are good. Possibly the politician's own IT back-end might have ... opinions... on the ability of the executive to overly check the legislative too.
Age restrictions + VPN bans + encryption restrictions + client-side monitoring + restricting general purpose computing.. It's just rapid descent into digital fascism set up by people who have no ability to see how the dots will end up connecting.
I guess the basic way to do this is to make VPNs age restricted.
I'm not as bearish on all this as most people here. I don't see much use for age restriction, except maybe keeping preteens off social media. That said, the proposed verification tech is very private, as far as I can tell. My review was cursory, though. Also, each EU member is free to use a different technical solution. Of course they're free to not make age verification obligatory at all. This programme is meant to be a strong default legislative and technical framework: it can't make EU members do something.
VPN usage increased, but how to they draw the conclusion that this is children. I think it's more likely that adults are using VPNs to not have to deal with the ID process. I would do that.
As VPNs usually cost some money, which is already a barrier for minors.
The internet is not the nice place it used to be with personal blogs. When we get younger employees they almost cannot work because of their phone addictions.
There is billions of research going into making children addicted through the window of their phone screen to watch apps, and now with AI this is getting even more dangerous.
It's not only children, also many elderly people are targeted. They are very lonely and then develop a Claude addiction.
Ugh. Here we go again. Europe’s politicians just cannot stop with wanting to control everyone and everything. It’s as if bureaucracy is the actual goal. Privacy and anonymity should be protected by law. Not violated by law.
People pointed that out quite a while ago already. Age sniffing is a joint attack on the freedoms of people, which explains why these lobbyists also try to abolish VPNs. Their vision for the world wide web is one of authorization. Ultimately they will fail, but a few get rich here in the process.
EU is totalitarian. If Europeans want to have a chance of protecting what's left of their freedoms, there's no other way than dissolving EU completely. It's not possible to reform that monster.
Ah yes, the most pressing issue of our times. Mandatory surveillance of every person's activities is a reasonable solution to the critical issue of teenagers watching porn, who totally won't be able to bypass this by... grabbing Dad's phone.
Obviously, it's not about the children. It was never about the children. If I had my way every one of these people would be taken to a gulag, because they are evil, have evil intentions, and blatantly lie to further their evil goals. I am tired of the intolerant being tolerated, and by allowing this to fester we are headed for a much worse totalitarian dystopia.
VPNs are essential tools against government persecution. Linking identity to a VPN session under any guise (age verification or otherwise) is something out of the playbook of dictatorial states.
Also, the EPRS did not argue that they are a loophole that needs closing.
From the actual paper:
> Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be
required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with
third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place.
The "some argue" is a link; it turns out that 'some' here is the Children's Commissioner for England, a post with, AIUI, only an advisory role in the UK, and obviously not even that in the EU.
Perhaps these legislators are addicted to porn and don't want their children to do to themselves the same they have done. Would explain their obsession and relentlessness to get this done.
It's just a pity they are destroying the internet while doing that. They should be attacking the companies making money from porn instead.
And by the way porn can damage your mind even after 18 so age verification is not a real solution anyway.
Y'all see the plan though, right? Control the internet. Remove e2e encryption. Control/stifle dissent and uprisings.
The plan is to replace the 99% with machines. It doesn't matter to the 1% if you survive their glorious, great filter.
The great filter is billionaires. It's a billionaire control problem, not a superintelligence control problem. You're livestock. There's a better ox and cart that just pulled down the gravel road.
In case people no longer remember, when China started to require websites to register for a license before be allowed to operate, it was for "protecting the children" too.
This simple policy then goes on to silence most individual publisher(/self-media) and consolidated the industry into the hands of the few, with no opportunity left for smaller entrepreneurs. This is arguably much worse than allowing children to watch porn online, because this will for sure effect people's whole life in a negative way.
Also, if EU really wants "VPN services to be restricted to adults only", they should just fine the children who uses it, or their parent for allowing it to happen. The same way you fine drivers for traffic violation, but not the road.
And if EU still think that's not enough, maybe they should just cut the cable, like what North Korea did.
Just a recap how it happened in Russia:
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc).
Similar stuff is happening in Turkey as well. Afaik with ipv6 adoption goverment mandates DPI hardware at ISPs. It was voluntary for ipv4 traffic.
France is already at 5! The free world marches on.
DPI = Deep packet inspection?
yes
8. 2026 White-list mode is occasionally enforced.
dont give them ideas man, with LLMs & image/video creation models, I'm this close to not caring about pubic internet now for non-work/news/payments
This is not idea, this is reality in 2026 (Tbf only for cellular internet)
True.
I remember writing about Roskomnadzor well before 2019, it’s existed at least since 2013, and don’t think it was particularly new then.
I could miss some things from memory, but RKN originally had much less power back in the days, they were just trying to execute court orders - it started actually being self-sufficient censorship agency in ~2019
Looks like you're talking about the new powers they got in 2018 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE...
But proper curial oversight stopped with the Lugovoi law in 2013, after which RKN could block directly based on orders from the General Prosecutor's office.
i noticed your profile has a lot of great info onthis. where did you learn?
and yet my friend in Moscow is able to use VPN to get around all this
This is very up to chance. Sometimes the VPN works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's fine on the home Internet, but fails on the cell data, sometimes it's otherwise. And it is fine if you're somewhat tech savvy and okay with tinkering with settings, but a huge pain for the older relatives.
TURN servers is whats needed in those situations
Yes, indeed, it is still possible. Right now RKN introducing new DPI capabilities at TSPU(govt filtering hw/sw stack mandated at ISP) - proactive host probing/scanning and mandate for russian services to check and report VPN users hosts. I.e. you use e-shop app and it will report you Nehterlands VPS IP if detected, including split-tunneling tricks)
"If you are not in prison yet, it is not your merit, but our failure." -- attributed to Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Upd: are they able to use VPN when the Internet is in so-called "white-list mode" where only certain websites are available?
> attributed to Felix Dzerzhinsky
You can attribute it to George Washington or Louis XIV with the same level of verifiability/veracity.
English is not my native language, but I believe "attributed" does imply unverifiability. Otherwise other word is used.
Won't they just be able to identify the traffic at his local internet provider as being suitable for a VPN usage match and send 'law enforcement' over?
It's cat and mouse game, VPN providers have to constantly update their protocol after being blocked by DPI.
I'm sure you're able to drive faster than the speed limit as well. The issue isn't whether technical circumvention is in the realm of possibility. The base issue here is that even so called 'democratic' governments seem to be copying the authoritarian playbook when it comes to cracking down on privacy online.
How about next year?
Do they sleep well at night?
But you are asking logical questions. You are thinking and talking too much for a World citizen in 2026. "Reasoning" is a reserved word for chatbots now, so we humans are not allowed to do that anymore. We can only obey like a bot and pretend all the lies they tell are the truth.
BTW I live in Turkiye where the government banned ALL the adult websites around 2008. Even as an adult you can't access them. This year they are banning VPNs, introduce age controls and ID verification COORDINATED with the rest of the world. Also banning some games, control social media, and basically make it legal to control and track everyone on the internet. What a coincidence that similar attempts are simultaneous in many independent countries.
And no, children have not been really protected in Turkiye since 2008.
Not only that, sprinkle a bit of hate speech laws on top and then you got rid a lot of political competition that could disagree with you
Grab a SIM-card from Bulgaria with roaming enabled. Internet is routed through the Bulgarian ISP even when you are in Turkiye. Full internet access, no VPN required.
Until the three representatives from Bulgaria and the ones from the other EU countries win out lobbying for ChatControl and expand it to VPNControl too.
You have to tolerate 100ms ping.
It’s like living in Australia baby. And yet believe it or not, people do!
Where do they coordinate that?
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You must be an American? Only Americans act like they get to define what the rest of the world calls places. It’s Gulf of Mexico. Only a country of idiots would call it gulf of America.
Its so funny to see this comment considering the dozens of geogrphic features around the world where countries have wildly different names for them.
Do you think Korea refers to the Sea of Japan by that name?
Do you see anyone making Koreans call it Sea of Japan? Americans can call it whatever they want as long as Americans never try to lecture others what it is called. Deal?
Uhh yes actually. There is an entire geopolitical issue surrounding this that has gone for decades.
So, you learn about geopolitical politics before posting, deal?
I have renamed the bird Türkiye . It was called Turkey in reference to the country, I think it’s fair to rename the bird too.
Oops, someone forgot languages evolve! Otherwise you must use Turkye, one of the Middle English spellings.
The United Nations agreed to their request, it’s a minor thing to let people spell it the way that was requested. You don’t have to, but others can. Languages evolve.
They evolve and they don’t. People call things whatever they want. How is it going for X/Twitter?
Twitter/X is a company, it calls itself whatever it wants, and is likely registered somewhere under a specific name. Okay, people don’t call it X, the same way people pronounce IKEA weirdly or refer to vacuums as hoovers.
Language is a malleable, artificial construct. What’s your point? That some people are stuck in their ways? Because the comment I was responding to was appalled that someone dares use the modern spelling for a country.
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Oops, someone forgot to not be a bellend in public.
Oops, someone forgot to not be a omo in public. I win!
I have never heard someone call Belarus White Russia, notably any of the Belarusians or Russians I know. I have no idea why someone would do that. Of all the hills to die on...
Lol I haven't seen anyone call Belarus white Russia in what, the past two decades?
Some people do be like that Japanese solider fighting a already lost war decades after.
I have never said turkiye before nor do I care about the country. I will do it now, in your face. Happy Saturday and stay triggered!
Wow it's pretty arrogant to tell someone how to spell their own country's name.
The name "Turkey" has been in the English language for many centuries. It's a bit of a tall order to suddenly demand that everyone start using a different name for the country. Imagine if England suddenly demanded that everyone call them Aengelande.
The government decided to do this because they're embarrassed that a bird has the same name as the country. Ironically, the bird is named after the country.
It's pretty arrogant for a foreigner to tell me how to spell his county name in my own language, which doesn't even have those letters in an alphabet. All while adding -stan suffix to my country name in their language.
In short, it's Turkey.
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Without me getting into the specific issue, that's false. Languages evolve by how they are used, regardless whether who uses them is native speaker or not. All languages who have been at some time used "universally" in larger regions evolved reflecting that reality.
> foreigners to tell us how we should write things in our own language.
They did that? Where?
I’m also assuming you’re from England, otherwise you’re also a foreigner speaking their language, and likely with considerable difference.
This is a genuinely dumb take and you should feel foolish for even thinking it.
Incase you dont, consider the concept of telling an Austrian that German is a foreign language for them. If this concept confuses you, I can get wikipedia links.
Thank you for telling me how I should feel! I will take it to heart and next time I'm in any doubt over how I am feeling I'll ask myself "how would LAC-Tech expect me to feel right now?" and change my feelings accordingly.
Funnily enough, on the HN zeal to prove you wrong about this, posters who dont know know about this topic dont actually realize Turkey dont give a damn about the Anglicanized name outside diplomatic context
Nice thing is we can render names in English however we want too!
You always hear the argument "protecting the children", because anyone oposing the regulation/laws can be labeled at best "exposing the children to danger" or at worst "pedofile". So as a consequence at best the oponents of such regulation/laws should not be listened to, or at worst they should be put into prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
The excuse has to be something nobody can appear to be supporting (pedophilia, terrorism, nazis, etc.). It's not only an appeal to emotion, it's also a false dichotomy, a loaded question, guilt by association.
Others look at this recipe and can't help but notice its effectiveness. Eventually nobody is beneath pulling this kind of logic, even if they were the ones crucifying it just a few short years ago. The weaker the leader, the more likely that that they forget where they wrote down those principles of theirs and resort to this crap.
> The excuse has to be something nobody can appear to be supporting (pedophilia, terrorism, nazis, etc.).
If only being associated with pedophilia and nazis was still something that had to be avoided because it would be career ending otherwise.
Right? I was just thinking that Maine looks to be electing someone who had nazi tattoos, and it would seem pedophilia is one of the few things both parties approve of at least in deed.
(Graham Platner had the tattoo covered up 10/2025)
> The excuse has to be something nobody can appear to be supporting (pedophilia, terrorism, nazis, etc.).
If this actually works then it should work in both directions, right?
Example: Many websites are malicious or adversarial, therefore anything enabling a service to discern whether the user is a vulnerable child is a boon to website-operating pedos and needs to be eliminated. The law should inhibit predatory services from being able to discern the user's age, to protect the children.
The FATF guidance actually state that if your purchase a VPN license (shows up on credit card bill) you should suspect of being pedophile by your bank staff:
https://x.com/moo9000/status/1901906097323012466?s=20
All government drifts toward autocracy over time, it takes constant pressure to keep it on track. It makes you tired after a while.
> In case people no longer remember, when China started to require websites to register for a license before be allowed to operate, it was for "protecting the children" too.
Indeed I do not remember this, nor can I find corroborating evidence that there was much of an effort to justify the requirement to the public at all. As far as I can tell, the government simply decided that they needed more control over the internet, so they made a law to give themselves more control over the internet. https://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2000/content_60531.htm It has no special provisions limited to children that only later got extended to adults. (Meanwhile, restrictions on how long children may play games continue to only apply to children, AFAIK.)
I have an extreme slippery slope idea.
If they want to protect children, shouldn't they sterilize everyone?
Every child born, regardless of wealth will inevitably suffer injury, illness, and psychological setbacks. Therefore, the best way to protect them would be not allowing people to have children.
By the way, not having children is also more eco-friendly, because an infinite series simply converges.
I wonder if I’ll see this ridiculous scene in my lifetime.
> By the way, not having children is also more eco-friendly, because an infinite series simply converges.
This one isn't actually accurate. Younger people have longer time horizons (i.e. aren't expecting to be dead as soon) and are therefore more likely to support policies like electrifying transportation and generating power from lower CO2 sources, and policies get enacted when they have majority support, so causing the population to skew older by reducing the number of children is ecologically very bad.
In theory. In reality the number of young people concerned about climate change is high, but the number of those willing to then not take a airplane for a few days of vacation is pretty low in my experience.
So supporting policies, "that somebody should do something" sure, also my generation thinks like this and the older one. But supporting policies that also actually affect themself, different story.
Because there is also the effect of doomerism. If the world is doomed anyway, then I can at least enjoy my vacation while I am still alive.
> In reality the number of young people concerned about climate change is high, but the number of those willing to then not take a airplane for a few days of vacation is pretty low in my experience.
Probably because air travel is something like 2% of CO2 emissions, driving long distances also emits CO2 so the actual reduction is more like 1%, and people understand what a cost/benefit ratio is.
Meanwhile they're significantly more likely to do things like buy an electric car or hybrid or install rooftop solar, which makes a much larger actual difference.
> But supporting policies that also actually affect themself, different story.
Who is more likely to support voting to fund car chargers, working people who are tired of buying gas or retirees who want to use that money to increase government retirement benefits?
> Because there is also the effect of doomerism.
Doomerism itself comes from being in the minority.
I would support air travel taxes even though I’ve used a plane 5 times this year already.
Just because I don’t believe in voluntary action doesn’t mean I wouldn’t accept society-wide policy. I want impactful societal action, not self-harm disguised as feelgood ecohobbies.
This problem can only be solved by coordinated government intervention.
Forced sterilisations for population control has been a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttawar_forced_sterilisations
Ashen vibes
They should just mandate 1 spouse should stay at home (working remotely or not working) or you must hire a full-time nanny. I'm only half joking. If your kid has enough unsupervised time to be watching porn on a regular basis, wtf is going on?
The solution is obviously to force CCTV inside homes, with data analyzed and hosted in a government cloud. If you are against this proposal, you support child abuse.
And no, this money couldn't be used to improve the life of families.
Yeah, but that means your child cannot have unsupervised sleep or rest time.
Showers will nanny, sleeping with the parent. What next?
But I applaud your only mildly extreme idea, builds on the insanity of these lying tools well.
Worth remembering that eugenics was the smart idea among many intellectuals in the earlier 20th century. The fascinating list of eminent adherents include J. Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill, T. Roosevelt, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, Herbert Hoover, J.H. Kellogg (of corn flake fame), Oliver Wendell Holmes, GB Shaw, Sidney Webb (early socialist, co-founder of the LSE & the Labour Party) and William Beveridge who created the British National Health System (NHS). Apparently Hitler wrote "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.". (Mein Kempf).
Eugenics is double-eged sword. It can lead to mutilation on social basis and dubious science.
It can also mean that disabled parents won't have to bring to life disabled children, which is a great relief.
A modest proposal?
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It is definitely not really "for the children", when legislation is aimed at all adults, and not specifically for parents. It is parents who should be responsible for the actions of their children and given the software tools to manage their online access. This arguably can be done with government sponsored and specific help for parents; software, websites, and shops with IT personnel.
These measures taken by the EU and other government entities has always been about surveillance, censorship, control, and eliminating freedom of speech and association. People need to keep calling out this continual deception and attempt to erode freedoms.
Not only in China. Russian internet cenzorship also started as a "children protection" measure.
Ursula von den Leyen has been pushing internet blocks in Germany for the sake of the children since 2009. Which is when "Zensursula" nickname has been coined. You don't need to look far to find the same thinking by the people in power.
>Ursula von den Leyen has been pushing internet blocks in Germany for the sake of the children since 2009. Which is when "Zensursula" nickname has been coined.
And then in a completely democratic mannner, Europeans said "that's who we want leading us".
>And then in a completely democratic mannner, Europeans said "that's who we want leading us".
No, it wasn't. She was chosen by a group of country leaders during a closed doors voting.
If it's democratic at all, it's very tangential.
I've taken that comment to be very sarcastic, but maybe it wasn't.
There's an election in the chain. Voters elected the national MPs who then selected the national PMs, who then selected von den Leyen. Democratic-ish.
After how many levels detached from the general population, does the vote stop being democratic?
It doesn’t stop being democratic. It’s just a scale from more to less democratic. America’s founding fathers were skeptical of democracy, so they provided for the president to be elected by the Electoral College, which was originally appointed by state legislatures. It’s still “democratic”—just less so than a direct election.
American people went to the polls to vote(or not) for Trump, Europeans didn't go to the polls to vote for Cenzura. Kind of a big difference on the democracy scale.
they know mass populace is stupid and won't look behind the title. Are you against the law "protecting children"? Shame on you
No, actually it started to protect intellectual property. A guy posted a recap in a post above.
You know, if Politicians, Law Enforcement and Military Personnel are included and affected by all these anti-privacy laws, I'm all for it (not really). Let their daily corruption come to light by the opposition exposing all their dirty laundry (because of course they'd used the data against each other) and vice-versa over and over... and that's not gonna happen because we don't live in that world where laws apply fairly to everyone.
"Rules for thee but not for me."
Europol is lobbying for this.
Of course, by using tax payers money.
It's amazing that they are spending billions on "think of the kids" problems, yet in many countries of the EU it's very hard to find a decent children playground in the city center.
I'm quite sure that if you asked parents, they would rather have the playground than the surveillance.
"...into the hands of the few..."
And there you have it, the actual reason for this.
You shouldn't have to be an "entrepreneur" to have a website. The idea that the only useful/interesting things to say are those that are profitable is a big part of the problem we find ourselves in.
or maybe just maybe its time for people to realize that the EU is an enemy of the people, and hold the people pushing for this personally responsible.
The simplest solution is perhaps to simply imprison any children found using a VPN until they reach 18, then the state can exert total control over their access to information and they can be safely released into unmoderated society on their 18th birthday.
> And if EU still think that's not enough, maybe they should just cut the cable, like what North Korea did.
I'll make a similar comment I made on another thread: we saw a thread with many upvotes hating on the cyber-libertarians... We all know the EU institutions are ran by cyber-libertarians and that it's cyber-libertarians making such research and decisions right?
Pick your fight brothers. I don't think spending your time hating on the three John Galts of this world is a worthy fight. You may even turn out to be more morally aligned with the John Galt of this world than with the people running the EU institutions (and North Korea).
The former cyber-libertarians are running the tech unicorns now. Ofc they would prefer you see them as John Galts lol. But they aren't that and they will defend freedom of cyberspace only as far as it aligns with their power and profit.
> The same way you fine drivers for traffic violation, but not the road.
Eh - my new car has an EU mandated speed limiter in it that takes over the cruise control. It uses a combination of GPS and vision to determine what speed limit to apply. Only slammed the breaks on on the motorway to drop from 120 to 80 KM/h erroneously 4 times in one journey last week.
Much like the oft maligned Google PM that releases/deprecates another chat product to get their promotion, some commissioner somewhere in Brussels managed to make the world a better place with this too.
Do you have a single link or other piece of evidence to substantiate this? I’ve never seen, nor can I find in a search, any evidence the ICP license scheme in place for that past 26 years in China has ever related to children in any meaningful sense.
It has the ring of BS. Why would an authoritarian government in a country with no free press or free elections feel any need to justify a speech regulation with a fig leaf? They openly restrict speech.
I think you’re full of it.
An authoritarian government needs excuses too. China even claims to be a democratic country. North Korea even has the word Democratic in its name. "Protecting children" is a common excuse China uses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_erotic_very_violent is a famous example of them trying to justify internet censorship under the name of "protecting children".
> In case people no longer remember, when China started to require websites to register for a license before be allowed to operate, it was for "protecting the children" too.
People don't remember because it didn't happen and the license wasn't about protecting the children. But it's so convenient to just blantantly lie on the internet nowadays, isn't it?
Just like the title of this article blatantly lies about "EU" doing something.
One of you ought to find out what really did happen, and tell us. I can only do the lame thing and quote Wikipedia:
> China had no such legislation until 1997. That year, China's sole legislative body – the National People's Congress (NPC) – passed CL97, a law that deals with cyber crimes, which it divided into two broad categories: crimes that target computer networks, and crimes carried out over computer networks. Behavior illegal under the latter category includes, among many things, the dissemination of pornographic material, and the usurping of "state secrets."
Notably, there’s nothing about children in that quote.
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> EU is more and more resembling North Korea.
The problem with hyperbolic comparisons is they tend to shut down the conversation. Yes this law is stupid and should be stopped. No, the EU is nothing like NK.
What law?
In this case EU is moving towards less freedom, but to compare it with one of the least free countries in the world is an exaggeration.
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Not remotely at full speed. This is not a law, and is not in any way being enforced. Bad ideas get proposed too often, but usually they get rejected. I expect the same will happen here, although we should absolutely remain vigilant.
I do share your concern for policy moving in the direction of NK, but the EU isn't moving there nearly as fast as for example the US.
Are you serious? In the US, you don’t get fined or arrested for posting mean memes like in Germany
You can clearly get indicted for it.
But much more serious is the widespread government censorship that would be unimaginable in the EU.
No point to argue. EU propaganda machine portrays EU as beautiful garden while the US is portrayed as the one descending into fascism.
You can’t push anto-freedom laws without mass brainwashing.
Portrayed? Have you seen the news at all in the past year? The US is descending into fascism really hard. Closing your eyes to it is not going to stop it.
If your worldview is based on news you are consuming, then I would like to avoid the discussion.
No, I don’t see the US descending into fascism. Quite the opposite. But the EU unfortunately does, and that saddens me a lot.
If your world view is based on "alternative facts", then I agree discussion is pretty much pointless. If the US isn't descending into fascism, it's only because it's already arrived there.
I'm not denying that the EU also has rising fascism, but they're not in power the way they are in the US.
You're right
Prove to me that people deserve to be free and not micromanaged on a day to day basis.
> This is arguably much worse than allowing children to watch porn online, because this will for sure effect people's whole life in a negative way.
I would like you to make that argument.
Parents can protect their children. Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet. This doesn’t affect the free exchange of ideas that my fellow countrymen enjoy.
Governments getting involved absolutely, unequivocally will be used to clamp down on the free exchange of ideas.
>My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet.
You sure about that? )))
Yes
Lol
That wasn't the point i was asking for an argument for. What I wanted to know is how age verification is worse then allowing children to watch porn. To make that argument.
> Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet.
Are they above the age of 16? Because then you're either Amish or out of touch.
If you want the logical approach; the premise you're suggesting you want people to argue from is faulty.
The argument kicks in at a slightly deep level. Age verification is unrelated to allowing children to watch porn. Someone needs to make an argument showing that age verification would lead to blocking porn, and that argument seems to be impossible to make (age verification is a much lighter standard than the bans on torrent websites, for example, and torrenting is still as easy as it ever was). To block kids viewing porn there'd need to be a - probably global - system of censorship that exerts total control over what people can POST and GET on the internet. The likes of which we have not yet seen and would likely have catastrophically negative political consequences.
Age verification isn't the problem. It is just a tool for censorship. It's censorship which is the problem.
So to put the bricks together: Age verification is worse than allowing children to watch pornography, because age verification is censorship.
I hope you can see how that argument is not compelling.
It’s not only compelling to a lot of Americans, it’s foundational.
That argument is hugely compelling.
Age verification will be implemented as identity identification. And that means anything you read or write or watch or say will be tied to your identity, registered by the government and other organizations, and used against you as an individual.
Do you understand now? Or will you only understand when you get fired from your job and they won't tell you the reason?
> Age verification will be implemented as identity identification.
Thank you for bringing an argument.
I want to start by tackling your argument head on. What if it's not though. What if it's implemented by attestation and signatures rooted at your local national government? Nobody will be able to tie whatever you watch or write to your identity, because they won't have it. To my understanding, that's what's proposed here, and that won't feasibly lead to any of the spooky consequences you're predicting.
There's another leg to it also. "anything you read or write or watch or say will be tied to your identity" is already true right now. Google is already, at this second, tracking my every move online and using it against me in a targeted advertisement campaign to change my spending habits, but my political affiliations too. If you're truly afraid of that outcome, I believe there are much more prescient and immediate things you should oppose than this.
> signatures rooted at your local national government? > Google is already, at this second, tracking my every move online
Apparently you haven't figured out yet that these two are partners. The government restrictions are needed in order to allow other players to perform correlation tracking and deducing your identity.
> Nobody will be able to tie whatever you watch or write to your identity, because they won't have it.
This is untrue in the light of what I said above. The proposed scheme lacks any proof of immunity against tracking and deducing identity. I haven't seen anything like a proof being discussed, while an honestly implemented scheme would require a long and well publicized discussion of the means of protection - to make sure it cannot be abused for political reasons.
The lack of such a discussion is actually a proof that the purpose of the proposed scheme is precisely abuse.
> there are much more prescient and immediate things you should oppose than this.
We can oppose more than one thing at a time. All of these privacy invading measures should be opposed as strongly as possible. Companies like Google should be broken up by the government, the parts should not be allowed to collude with each other, and there should be laws preventing the kind of data collection they do without full transparency, user control, and ownership.
I realize this thread is a half day old, but porn is like the least concerning thing I prohibit my child from consuming off the internet. I grew up on a farm, animals work just like we do. There is obviously some messed up stuff some people find enticing, but youtube kids is way more damaging than even the weird stuff. Kids mostly have standard adult disgust filters. Ytk and similar addictive feeds bypass that with things that are far more subtle.
There are ways to do age verification without tying your identity to the content. A site could direct you through a proxy to the government's eID server with simply the request whether you're over 18. Because it's going through an anonymising proxy, the government has no idea what site you're visiting. You login to your eID, which confirms or denies that you're over 18. The porn site only knows what porn was watched and that the person watching is over 18. The proxy only knows someone was visiting the porn site at that particular time. The government knows who you are and that you were visiting a site at that time, but not which site.
> There are ways to do age verification without tying your identity to the content.
That's wishful thinking. The site would log that they sent you to verify your ID with your IP and a timestamp. The proxy server would get your identity with your IP and timestamp. Those two can can be linked. The government would know exactly who you are while also knowing where you came from and when.
Either the government would monitor the proxy or they'd just be running the proxy themselves or forcibly taking it over Room 641A style to log everything going in and out.
There is zero way to verify your identity to a website without trusting some third party with that information. There's no one in the US who is trustworthy enough or immune from being controlled by the US government so you'll always be vulnerable to having your identify exposed and it being used against you.
The best suggestion I've heard so far was scratch off cards that could be purchased anywhere in person, with cash, after presenting ID. The ID isn't logged or scanned, just manually checked by the wage slave at the counter. Even that isn't without challenges though since the cards would have codes that would likely be traceable to batches and where they were distributed to/purchased from which means that information can be checked against surveillance/facial ID/flock cameras to find out who bought them, and they can also be resold/shared online/exchanged/stolen/generated/given to others which means they won't be very effective at identifying individuals or keeping kids from seeing adult content.
The truth is that the entire point of these age verification laws is deanonymization, censorship, and control. Any theoretical scheme we might come up with that wouldn't allow for abuses will never be implemented for that reason.
Obviously there needs to be a desire to set this up responsibly. A government that doesn't care about privacy at all can force whatever they want. But the EU care a lot about privacy. They're got strong data protection regulation. Having sensible barriers in place can protect them from overstepping. The proxy obviously needs to be independent.
Nobody thought to protect western millennials from accidentally wandering across porn on the internet, and we mostly grew up ok
I don't understand why porn is such a problem and an excuse. There is so much genuinely horrifying stuff on the internet - including gore, pictures and videos of all kinds of abuse, but the problem is always with people having sex on camera for money...
>I don't understand why porn is such a problem and an excuse.
Because porn is the most taboo things in public, even if a lot of people use it at home. Nobody will come and defend liberal porn access because then everyone will call you a gooner or a pedo. It'll probably be the end of your political debate.
Which means porn access can be weaponized without any political opposition. It's the perfect scapegoat to remove online anonymity disguised as "age verification".
Yes, I agree, my point was more about why is sex such a taboo, when there are things out there, that are genuinely worse. But I guess it's a bit too wide of a topic to have a productive discussion.
You misunderstood. Sex is not taboo, admitting to consuming porn to the public is.
I think the important part is that parents talk with their children about the nature of porn. It's unavoidable that they're going to run into it at some point, and I think it's important that they understand that's not what real sex is like.
I did catch my son watching porn when he was 13. We talked about it, I blocked some stuff at my router (hardly comprehensive, but mostly to make it easy to avoid the thing he was watching), and then stopped worrying about it. He's 17 now. I'm sure he knows how to find it if he wants it, but I also trust he's able to interpret it responsibly. He seems like a well-adjusted kid. I worry more about his gaming addiction, but it doesn't seem to be interfering with school anymore.
I don't have kids yet, but I remember what it was like as a teen. Now from the perspective of the adult, all that stuff about how porn supposedly damages young person's view of what real sex is like was exaggerated. In fact, porn ended up being a pretty decent educational experience for me. Definitely filled the gaps that the "responsible education" left behind. On the other hand, as a young boy I saw some very drastic self-harm pictures online and it's been with me since - almost 30 years later I still remember.
re: gaming addiction - my parents were obsessed with me being "addicted". Now, as an adult, I don't care about games anymore. Everything I have I owe to computer skills and English. What my parents didn't want to see (or couldn't?) was that at the time games were the only interesting thing to do. We were glued to the screens mostly because everything else sucked.
> I don't understand why porn is such a problem and an excuse.
It's a cultural thing
What argument?
You're the one that needs to argue the presence of harm, given you're the one arguing we need to create a surveillance dragnet to shield certain age groups of humans from witnessing how their species procreates.
The default state is that humans procreate via sexual reproduction. You need to argue why we need to take action to hide this, especially given we let children witness other far more brutal activities from the human species like violence.
The argument I am asking him to make is the one about how age verification is "much worse" than "allowing children to watch porn".
If your argument in favor of that is that watching porn isn't harmful to children, then I don't understand what all that superfluous waffling about china is doing in there.
> This is arguably much worse
Surely someone claiming it's arguable should be willing to make that argument.
For me it's not that it's reproduction. Film that shows sex is not an issue as I see it and I don't know anyone that has developed serious addictions to sex in Hollywood film. However I know several people, family members included, that have absolutely obliterated their childhoods and early adult years by becoming addicted to porn. They were groomed by adults online from a young age and, although their parents tried to stop it, kids are sneakier and they got around it, exposing themselves to some truly dark things. It is not easy for families to recover from having dealt with a child with serious addiction issues.
I think it's pretty silly to argue that systemic protections are ineffective and overreach whereas the efforts of one or two parents should be enough and are the correct level of enforcement for the protection of children. The parents of the people I know went to extremes to protect their children and they were mostly unsuccessful.
Sounds like the people you describe were outliers with some preexisting conditions, and probably shouldn't be used as any sort of baseline or point of comparison.
Just to add my perspective, I am one of those outliers who is still going to therapy for porn/sex addiction that started in adolescence. Age verification wouldn't have helped me because addiction wasn't my main or only issue - I also had significant sources of stress owing to my upbringing. I could have just as easily been addicted to drugs or alcohol because of those stressors, or used a VPN. Either way I needed some form of stress relief beyond what any teen ought to need, and those were the options I saw.
Combination of abuse and unfettered access to drinks/drugs/Internet is way worse than either one alone. At the same time I think the issue of bad parenting is a) not one people talk about out loud because of stigma (we can attack tech CEOs all day for pushing addictive products but anyone can become a parent and none of them will stand to be called the "bad" one) and b) not amenable to much change save for a global in-house surveillance panopticon. Yes we can choose to place trust in parents to protect children from Instagram and PornHub, but consider that some parents just... won't. Neither can we force them to. What then?
I wouldn't think that since people who don't suffer from these issues outnumber those who do suffer, that makes this not a real issue. Consider the victims of opiate addiction, alcoholism, or sex trafficking. Are those situations so fundamentally different? How many people does one have to know with tragic childhoods for it to be a problem that people take seriously?
There's a big gap between 'some kids get addicted to porn' and 'lets agegate the internet as completely as possible'
This title seems misleading.
The EP paper appears to be highlighting the existence of a debate regarding VPN.
Relevant quote:
"Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place. The Children's Commissioner for England has called for VPNs to be restricted to adult use only.
While privacy advocates argue that imposing age-verification requirements on VPNs would pose significant risk to anonymity and date protection, child-safety campaigners claim that their widespread use by minors requires a regulatory response. Pornhub and other large pornography platforms have reportedly lost web traffic following the enforcement of age-verification rules in the UK, while VPN apps have reached the top of download rankings."
Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs, but nowhere in this paper is "the EU" stating that VPNs need closing.
These dimwits (and I don't just mean those in EU) seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn, and are ready to mess with internet infrastructure for that. That's a depressing manifestation of aging society
> seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn
no, they want to pretend this is the issue, so that pervasive monitoring or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized. It is to serve the state apparatus, rather than any actual protection.
If it is possible to "pretend that they want something reasonable", it means that there is something reasonable somewhere.
Maybe some want more control, but most certainly not everybody.
> so that pervasive monitoring
If you haven't gotten the memo, pervasive monitoring already exists. To sell ads.
> or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized
For age verification, it's possible to do it in a privacy-preserving manner. Now people spend their time complaining about the idea and claiming that all who disagree are extremists, so it doesn't help. But we could instead try to push for privacy-preserving age verification.
guy on website called hackernews, tries to convince everyone more restrictions are good
Regulations are also restrictions, lots of people here are pro regulation when it comes to things they don't like.
This topic is just unfavorable with this community... for good reasons.
As a hacker, I want antitrust to break TooBigTech such that they can't cryptographically lock me out of everything.
Those who want less regulation are not hackers, but rich and powerful assholes.
Hey, I'm not rich and powerful, how dare you.
Website called "Hacker News" has had zilch to do with the Hacking community for almost a decade now. It's VC and corporate apologist news.
Are you calling me a corporate apologist? For one, corporations want less regulation.
"Being a hacker" does not mean "being stuck in the 80s", IMO. If TooBigTech cryptographically controls everything, it becomes harder to hack. Are you aware that the biggest restriction against jailbreaking stuff is that it was made super illegal... because it helps corporations?
You open with corporations want less regulations then give an example of corporations using law to protect their interests around jailbreaking? Just like they did with copyright/IP rules and the million rules around cars
You should ask the DIY diabetes community what they think of FDA regulations preventing modifications of medical devices.
Being reductive about this stuff is not a helpful framing.
> Are you calling me a corporate apologist? For one, corporations want less regulation
Ah yes, so that's why Meta et al are the main ones behind pushes for more "think of the children" ID verification/attestation regulations.
Is that how it went? My feeling is that more and more people are realising that social media are terrible for the children (well, for everybody, but children we want to protect). Therefore more governments are looking into preventing children from accessing social media. Therefore social media companies are trying to lobby for whatever is better for them.
For Meta, it's better to have age verification than to downright ban social media.
In my experience they DO want more regulation. Regulation that helps them. The automobile’s industry was lobbying for years to have all kinds of things mandatory. They invented lots of standards and pseudo standards. At the end they shoot themselves in the foot.
what i personally don't like about privacy-preserving age verification is the single subsequent law change that would criminalize individuals for "improperly" doing age verification.
it'd be so easy to do, and would immediately make obsolete any measures taken digitally to preserve privacy
How would an individual improperly do age verification?
It's not really about kids looking at porn, it's about tracking everyone else and making it easier for state surveillance and corporations to identify people.
Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny.
But how to make people accept it? Tell them they want to expose kids to gruesome tentacle porn, or else they'd support this. Few adults are willing to admit they even look at porn, let alone argue that this is an important activity that needs to be protected, which it is.
If you think that there is a need for new technology to identify people, I suggest you wake up and start getting informed about surveillance capitalism.
There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already.
Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that.
Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse.
People who are actually interesting, are often aware of that fact and avoid surveillance at the moment. You can use tor/i2p, proper VPN setups, VMs, alternative mobile ROMs and other tech and cut most of the fingerprints, trackers and identification. Pretty sure the trash from state agencies doesn't like that.
But the current push from all sides to provide id for everything and remote attestation through Google and apple will make the alternatives very hard to use as it basically cuts such people from the economy altogether.
Need is a very strong word. I'd call it a desire. Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved. What they want to do is to plug in a private corporation separate from whatever service that is likely to be more loyal with the state apparatus than the service, or else it is easily switched out for another.
And corporations are having issues discerning bots from people without making access to their services a fuss or dependent on possibly idealistic and troublesome open source projects, like Anubis.
It's truly, absolutely, not about "age verification". If it were about protecting kids from harm they'd take money from corporations post factum that are offending. Instead they're preparing to spend a lot of money. You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US. They couldn't care less about kids except for obscene or profitable purposes. It would be weird for them to be cosy with epsteinian networks of power and at the same time be mindful about the wellbeing of children.
> Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved
You vastly underestimate the current state of surveillance capitalism.
> You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US.
Go in the street, and ask a bunch of random people: "If there was a way to prevent kids from accessing stuff that is bad for them, and it had no downsides. Would you want it?". I'm absolutely certain that not only fascists will say they would want it.
Well why did you say to them it doesnt have downsides? It has downsides and a very essential one like privacy.
> Well why did you say to them it doesnt have downsides? It has downsides and a very essential one like privacy.
It is possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. So... you're wrong here.
No one is doing it that way though. Also to be truly privacy-preserving you cannot rely on anything that requires any specific OS (especially Android or iOS) as every single OS requires some compromises to privacy.
The only privacy-preserving (effective) age verification is asking user if they are over 18 and requiring that they answer truthfully under penalty of perjury. Then prosecute the kids who claim they are over 18. For reason or another no one seems to be pushing for that option.
> No one is doing it that way though
Well it exists in Privacy Pass, which is deployed in production. And there are countries that are currently actively looking into privacy-preserving age verification. I don't think that "I keep saying that age verification fundamentally leaks your ID, which is wrong, but it's still valid because nobody will notice" is a good argument.
> The only privacy-preserving (effective) age verification is asking user if they are over 18 and requiring that they answer truthfully under penalty of perjury.
I disagree, I think that there could be a sane debate around ZK age verification, if we could elevate it to that.
There are a lot of things that most people in the street want that aren't even on the road map to happening, so you have to ask yourself why this thing (which isn't hardly anyone's top motivating issue) is gaining traction.
> this thing (which isn't hardly anyone's top motivating issue)
Do you have kids growing up with social media?
My experience is that parents with kids growing up with social media generally care about whether or not social media are bad for their kids. And generally, parents try to give kids a smartphone and access to social media as late as possible, generally when "everybody else has it" and it feels like it becomes counter-productive to make an outlier out of your kid.
I wouldn't say nobody cares. If anything, I think most parents would care a lot more about limiting access to social media than about privacy. It's pretty obvious that nobody gives a shit about privacy.
OK, so make an argument.
My argument is: it is possible to do privacy-preserving age verification, and that technology is already deployed (look at Privacy Pass). We should acknowledge that and stop claiming that the age verification issue is the same as the E2EE one, because it is NOT.
And then we could maybe have a constructive debate about whether or not we as a society want that technology. That would be more interesting than "if I keep yelling that it's fundamentally stupid, maybe people on the other side will start believing it".
You're still just stating your opinions. What do you mean by "it is possible"? Are you sure there are states that are privacy respecting enough to actually be able to, or have all the relevant states broken down walls between government agencies that would shield citizens from secret surveillance and registers?
> You're still just stating your opinions.
No, I'm talking about cryptography. That is, maths.
When I say that it is possible to encrypt a message in a way that only the receiver can read it, and the server relaying it cannot, it is not an opinion. I am stating a fact. Zero knowledge proofs are maths, too.
> What do you mean by "it is possible"?
I mean that there are maths that do exist that enable it. There is code that is already written that does it every day. It does exist.
But nobody can be arsed to spend a few minutes getting informed before complaining. It's not just cryptography: people who are very vocal against 5G usually believe that "it boils your blood" or some variant of it, people who are very vocal against vaccination usually have absolutely no idea how it works, that's just how it is. It is frustrating, I guess I just have to accept it.
Saying "it's not possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner" is like saying "it's not possible to deploy 5G in a way that doesn't burn people": it is at best uninformed, possibly just manipulative. Sure, it's possible to burn someone with a strong enough radio signal. But the fact remains that it is possible to deploy 5G in a way that does not burn people, and 5G is nothing special in that regard (it's just "electromagnetic waves", which is a well-known physics concept).
There would be a sane debate to have around 5G (e.g. ultra-consumerism or whatever), but I have never, EVER heard it. The 5G debate is "uninformed people claiming it boils your blood" versus people who find it useful and rightly don't believe the bullshit claims of the first group.
The age verification debate is "uninformed people claiming that it is impossible" versus people who find it useful, and can rightly dismiss the claims of the first group, because really, it is possible.
I don't see how any of these grudges of yours are relevant to the question I asked to try and put you on track to make an argument I'd expect to move us in a fruitful direction.
Believe me, in some EU countries (like my country Poland) people are very sensitive for this kind of bullshit.
Last two times they tried to push other censorship/tracking laws (claiming as always "we have to, EU is making us") there were mass protests in every city and town.
In my own town of 5k people there were several hundred (500 people at least, probably more). And the previous govt backed down.
This topic seems to be coming back everytime certain countries (Denmark etc) hold the rotating EU presidency. Our current PM is certainly in the same EU clique that wants to push this so much, but it's an extremely unpopular position and he is already leading a weak minority coalition govt. It wouldn't take much to topple him, so he will not do anything like that (unless he is convicted people are distracted with some crisis, but that is where normal people come in. To keep watching what is being smuggled in).
I wonder why do voters in those countries that propose these laws tend to allow this to happen again and again.
It's because it's not about the opinion of voters, but about existing political powers that want to retain their power.
No matter what you (as population) say it will get implemented. If you don't, then they will put sanctions on Poland, withdraw financial partnerships, etc. Like with migrants, they are going to be sent there, even if Polish people vote against.
No matter if you are in favor or against, raising the topic will just make you socially be isolated or even legally punished in some places.
Sad for democracy and free speech.
EDIT: clarified about migrant policy and the decision of countries to choose or not
I think you are confusing democracy with anarchy. There is tons of free speech in Europe, and it is the most democratic of all countries that are alternative. UK is still very democratic country. The generation of politicians from zero rate era had gotten carried away on certain topics (defence, immigration) and now we have to deal with this. they also have undermined public trust by acting the way they did in covid, to an extent that any new pandemic is likely to be way worse just because no body will trust the government again for a long time.
But there is a problem with kids today having pretty easy access to all kinds of nasty shit on internet, and it isnt like it was in 90s and 00s. 10 year olds on social media is fucked. I dont really care for blocking internet on anything, yet it does appear that simple age verification is necessary for access to certain services.
most people are just super mad that they wont be able to watch porn or their favourite show thats on netflix or whatever. BUt thats not what the article was about. Read a little bit. Comparing EU to fucking Russia is insane here.
Why is it insane? You get a police visit and fine for posting mean memes in Germany
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Poland and other nations should be carefull with handling of imigration, as history shows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_expulsion_of_Polish_Jews_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_of_Jews_from_Nazi_G...
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What exactly is your issue? Please enlighten us on what qualifies YOU specifically to tell the veracity of any claim on Polish interior politics.
I just don’t like criminals, no matter where they come from, it’s quite ok but yes selecting immigration is a socially slippery topic
my personal opinion is it’s an all or nothing thing for immigration. you either reduce entirely for all groups or it’s racism and unfair treatment. everyone deserves an equal chance
>you either reduce entirely for all groups or it’s racism and unfair treatment.
Racism would be restricting immigration over skin color. What people want, and a lot of countries have, is immigration based on merit system: education, skill, income, criminal record. There's nothing racist about that.
There's something in-between that could work: allow everyone, kick criminals permanently, and give a path to permanent residence to others, or something like that.
Seems moderate.
I didn’t see race mentioned in the comment?
I just made it softer (though I never mentioned race but economic migration), still can be too sensitive so let it be, just my opinion (I am in Eastern Europe and there the views are rather harsh, compared to Germany or France or Sweden)
You havent said anything wrong about immigration. People who misunderstood you are racist themselves as they have dismissed cultural issues of your country and tried to impose their own views. So dont listen to them, they are just ignorant at best.
>Your racist drivel is offtopic here.
@dang, how about the HN rules here?
Poland has a fresh memory on communism and censorship. Sadly the alternative to your current PM is PiS, who banned abortion, so basically christian conservatives with some fascist ideas, not very different than the ones currently running the US.
To the EU regulators: we don't need another Stasi, we already have Google and Meta to worry about, thank you.
Also, to regulate in my native language is just a nice way to say the f word, if this conversation is about porn.
it's not about porn, it's about power over all citizens.
Practically all the ills we suffer currently are depressing manifestations of an aging society.
That, and the lack of real issues to solve.
Without thinking too hard I can name a few?
The rise of authoritarianism? Inequality? Revival of geopolitical "realism"? Decrease in empathy and holistic thinking? Increasing willingness of the general population to engage in political adventurism? Accelerating resource consumption (and decelerating resource stocks).
And if you consider none of those "real" problems, I know some people seem to have forgotten about it, but what about climate change? Given the half-life of CO2 and methane, that's a problem as "real" as they get.
There's also a worrying trend of education getting less effective across the first world.
If only we were all privileged enough to believe that the problems in the world today weren't real.
There are real problems and they are huge but the solutions to them are very unpopular. So that's why political parties resort to this kind of distraction politics. Blaming immigrants, LGBT people etc. Or simply causing other problems by bombing random countries for no reason.
Because nobody wants to limit the big corporations polluting the world and exploiting the population, tackle climate change with more than some hollow measures. Because people will be annoyed when it affects them and that means political suicide.
So they manufacture other problems, ones they can control and point the blame to groups that have little voting power.
I was talking about the first world. And yes, I think most if not all of the problems in the first world are gratuitously self-inflicted.
Even if that were true (it isn't) you would want to consider the systemic issues that background self-sabotage.
Where is the cushy insulated bubble you're living? Can I join?
You don't really believe this is about porn?
Adolescents, or kids? Would you say it's completely stupid to want to stop kids from watching porn, or accessing social media?
Did you grow up with free streaming platforms? Pretty sure many adolescents were accessing porn before those, though it was slightly less accessible.
I personally don't have a definitive opinion about porn (I feel like young kids obviously shouldn't have access to it, but it shouldn't be illegal to adults, but I don't know where the limit should be), but I feel like making it harder for kids to access social media makes sense.
I dunno, you have experience being a kid, right? Young kids are just not interested enough to look for porn, not to say figure out how to use VPN to access it. Lax restrictions like we have today are enough to stop porn from being forced on children who are not interested in it
It's not just "look for porn", it's "being exposed to stuff they shouldn't be exposed to".
E.g. the problem of social media is not that kid access information. It's more that kids get harassed by other kids.
The title is also the exact title for that paper’s chapter.
You are right at pointing out that the paper is overall presenting the subject in a balanced manner, unfortunately it seems a bad choice was made when it came to that specific sentence, that gives a venue for it to be fed in the outrage machine.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
In that specific sentence the source is cited (via hyperlink). So even if you read it out of all context you can still find out the source is UK's Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza who said it, not "the EU" (whatever that means).
For this "story" to gain legs, someone must have pulled that sentence out of content without mentioning the source and then added some misleading context for the outrage.
It has been chosen as a chapter title.
In my view, it lends more authority to that statement over the other citations in that chapter.
I am inclined to take this as a honest editorial mistake: adding a ? at the end would have been the right choice.
I might be a bit lost on what you/we mean by context. For me, it’s the original pdf from the EU, no quotes.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
Showing children naked humans is a horrible crime.
Bombing children is OK and we happily produce and deliver all the weapons needed for that.
Patterns of an ill society.
"Children's Commissioner for England"... that's not the EU. Really not the EU - they had a whole election and years-long process to leave the EU.
The point is that does not stop the EU from quoting the Children's Commissioner for England on the first page of this document:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
This needs a new "law of headlines": whenever it's the EU saying something, it's never the EU that said that.
Even the, it's incredibly vague at best, equivalent to "The USA said that", which only makes sense in a context where the relevant spokespeople are well-defined (such as a UN assembly or something), but who is the general spokesperson for the USA or the EU?
Usually things like these are qualified like "the Department of Defense of the USA stated X".
But you single out just one paper. If you include all paper and discussions the picture is super-clear, and the title is not misleading at all. This has to be said.
> Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs
The word choice is quite revealing. You write "regulate VPNs". To me this is not "regulation" at all - it is restriction or factually forbidding it. It is newspeak language here if we dampen it via nicer-sounding words. It also distracts from the main question: why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?
> why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?
Live sports, they’re already assaulting internet infrastructure in various EU member states (eg. La Liga forcing Spanish ISPs to block cloudflare IPs during matches). With this in mind it seems less a case of surveillance state and more a case of corporate state capture.
If someone wants a guaranteed riot in a Latin country, they just need to somehow mess around with football.
This is the only paper that is presented as a source for this statement. I'm not the one singling it out.
This is how waters are tested and potential negative reactions are probed.
I think all the identity verification schemes should start with the beneficial owners of companies. Governments have been lobbied to allow complete anonymity for the wealthy that own businesses doing questionable things while regular people are going to have to show id to buy food.
> Governments have been lobbied to
Yep... and to make it worse, nobody is trying to push them towards looking at privacy-preserving age verification: instead technologists try to convince them that they just shouldn't regulate anything. Which... may not work so well.
As someone who lives in a jurisdiction which does require such disclosure: it is a significant inconvenience for small businesses, and no benefit to the general public.
Do small businesses in your area have complicated ownership structures that it's significantly inconvenient to disclose the one family that owns, for an example small business , a plumbing repair company with 4 vans and 6 employees?
They might? If they don't and it is trivial to identify the beneficial owner, why is it necessary to create a requirement to disclose? The practical experience is that people are quite bad at this sort of requirement, that may well be a source of problems and that on aggregate making it harder to do business has a notable impact [0] on general prosperity. Don't needlessly put barriers in front of people who create wealth.
It isn't a stretch to imagine that a small business owner literally doesn't have enough time in their life to maintain their own health and run their business. There are some pretty grim stories out there, I can tell one based on a friend of mine who was working ... I think 70 hour weeks. Sounded rough. It isn't actually crazy to say they may not have an hour free to figure out what form they need to fill out and where to file it, or that they'd be too sleep deprived to get it right. Assuming that this thing is the only thing they need to disclose and there aren't any other pieces of paperwork that need filing (which we all know there will be).
Sure if they have to they'll probably figure it out in most cases, maybe it is trivial. But the businesses where a straw broke the camel's back don't exist any more to point at as evidence. It is hard to know.
[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation
Lots of small businesses are operated from home. Their business information is scraped, transformed into personal information, sold to spammers and scammers, and in some cases abused in an automated fashion along with thousands of others.
Registering a phone number with the official company registry is sure to get you a scam call within the hour. People will come up to your house later to sell you power contracts you don't need, phone numbers you never wanted, and they will lie through their teeth to forge your signature if you don't agree. If you're unlucky, you'll be fighting a handful of scam companies in court within the first year, charging you thousands every month, because B2B contracts don't have the kind of protections customers have.
The only way to live a somewhat safe life as a small business owner is to have a dedicated phone number you never answer and a dedicated post office address where nobody lives.
These kinds of requirements made a lot of sense thirty years ago, but nowadays, with billions of people able to abuse every bit of information you publish instantly from anywhere while you're asleep, it makes a lot less sense.
In theory this documentation can be used to prevent scams and crimes, but actual enforcement of people's identities has become a problem, and the criminals have plenty of unsuspecting family members, homeless people, or mentally handicapped adults they can pressure into signing papers.
You get extra spam. Any data that ends up on those public lists will be used to spam you. Some websites will also correlate all the data they have on you too, so you can get that spam at home too.
Basically, you have no privacy if you start a small business under these kinds of rules.
Precisely what inconvenience does it actually cause those businesses?
Your personal info becomes public because it's attached to the business information. This can include phone numbers, emails, full names, home addresses etc. All accessible online by anyone, including spammers, scammers, swatters etc.
Yes... if you want to do business with people, then those people want to know who they do business with.
What a fucking tragedy.
I'm sorry you have to live in such a socialist hellscape.
Well, the problem is all the bad actors. Why don't you post your full name, home address, email address, and phone number right here? You "do business" too, right?
Should everyone in the world then be able to have access to the information I mentioned just because you work for someone?
Umm, yes? My contact information is attached to the business names I trade under? Which is publicly available information.
Is this an alien concept to you?
Shell companies for the ruling class, ever decreasing anonymity for the peasants.
The people who really want to stop VPNs are commercial streamers, especially for live sports. Regardless of state, or governing party, it always comes back to money.
This probably needs to be highlighted more.
It isn't just governments.
This is also quietly being backed by some big corporations with money .
> governments
> big corporations with money
Is there a notable difference between these two in most places? There _should_ be but in practice it feels like more and more places function closer to an oligarchy than whatever form of “democracy” they espouse to practice.
I'm scared that the influence of the largest companies exceeds governments of most nations.
The EU is losing around €50 billion every year to the fraud-scheme dubbed the VAT carousel (or MITF). The fix would be ridiculously simple, starting with an EU-wide VAT-ID scheme and a modicum of cooperation between financial ministries.
Not one policy maker has ever seemingly cared about this. But VPNs! That'll fix the budget and demographic crises of European nations, for sure.
I'm curious to see how the EU will maneuver it's new long-term financial plan when none of the members can even pay the membership fee soon.
How come tax loopholes aren't as scrutinized?
Mandatory age verification online is a blight imho. It should be outlawed.
I agree, age verification on the web should 100% banned.
Parents should learn how to be parents; the government shouldn't force companies to do parenting instead.
Governement should force companies to give parental controls tools. Gaming companies like Nintendo and Steam do that, I can create a kid account with parental controls.
Social media companies (e.g. Meta, Snap) are the first that should provide that but they don't.
Band and severely punish systematic violations of privacy.
Regulate the poison first, not the access to it. All this age verification nonsense is an admission that some platforms knowingly harm their users. And instead of fixing the issue by cracking down on the proverbial crack, governments make everybody's life worse.
I remain hopeful that one day, humans will regard the online advertising companies with the same scorn we do the tobacco industry and may they be ashamed and disgusted at our inaction.
So you're implying alcohol and cigarettes should be sold to children?
(Not to mention all the other consent age laws.)
That said, VPN is a national security issue, children are only a pretext.
Children have always found ways to access age restricted consumables. Whether that was porno mags, alcohol or cigarettes.
They’d just get an older sibling, or stranger to buy it. Or they’d have a fake ID. Or they’d just steal it from a family member.
But you know which kids did this the least? It was the ones where their parents / guardians took their responsibilities as a guardian properly.
> Children have always found ways to access age restricted consumables
Doesn't mean that it's equivalent to giving them free access to those consumables.
> But you know which kids did this the least?
Source?
> Doesn't mean that it's equivalent to giving them free access to those consumables.
Why do people on HN always need to look at things as a Boolean state? It’s entirely reasonable to have some preventative measures but acknowledging that there are ways to circumvent them and accept that as a reasonable conclusion.
Things don’t need to be “all or nothing” ;)
> Source?
I grew up pre-WWW. Literally lived and breathed the points I’m making.
But don’t just take my word on this. Ask anyone of a certain age and they’ll tell you the same: they either tried cigarettes or knew lots of kids in school who smoked under the age of 16. They had access to alcohol under the age of 18. And pornographic content was easy to get hold of under the age of 18.
The age at which they gained access and the frequency of the usage depended greatly on their upbringing.
> It’s entirely reasonable to have some preventative measures but acknowledging that there are ways to circumvent them and accept that as a reasonable conclusion.
I totally agree. That can be used as an argument in favour of age verification, though.
Sure, if you ignore the other part of my comment where I said parents should be responsible for the upbringing of their own children.
I disagree with that part.
Parents cannot be responsible for what other children can do.
If all the children use social media, good luck preventing your kid from participating. "It's okay, just be completely disconnected from everything they share between each other, it's not important to socialise, you can make friends when you are old".
The problem with social media is that it's not okay for one kid to be disconnected. What we want as a society is to prevent them all, so that they are all in the same situation.
Again, you’re talking about things in a Boolean state.
Our kids have access to social media, but we also know what they have access to because we check their phones periodically.
This is a far better approach than an “all or nothing” approach because we are giving the kids the freedom to learn how to use these tools maturely. But without removing any safety nets for if/when our kids (or any other kids in their social circles) fail to use such tools responsibly.
That’s called “parenting”.
Censoring access to tools, either via government regulations or over zealous parenting, doesn’t teach children anything. Whereas allowing kids to learn to use the tools but being around to support and help them grow when mistakes are made, is precisely what responsible parents should be doing.
And that’s the same approach you should take with learning anything as a child. You give them guidance and allow them to make mistakes but be there to support them. Kids don’t learn to ride a bike from telling them “bikes are dangerous” then suddenly when they’re 16 handing them a bike and telling them to ride it to colleague. So why are you treating social media like that?
> Again, you’re talking about things in a Boolean state.
I am not, so either you don't understand my opinion, or you manipulate it because it's convenient.
I am not, AT ALL, saying that we should make bikes illegal to kids. But some things make sense to me: we should not sell cigarettes or alcohol to kids. "Go ahead my son, you're 13, you should make your own mistakes: try smoking for a month like your friends, and then I'll explain to you why it is a bad idea" is not how I apprehend "parenting".
I am actually saying that it is nuanced, and that it is difficult to know where to put the limit. Should cocaine be allowed to kids? Cannabis? Cigarettes? Social media? Bikes? Chocolate?
> So why are you treating social media like that?
Maybe you think that social media are like bikes, and that's your right. I think they are closer to drugs. Maybe you think everything should be legal (drugs, killing, ...) and that "parenting" is the solution to all, I don't.
Like cigarettes, the message is "you should never do it, but when you'll get older it will be your choice to do that stupid shit". That is obviously not how I treat bikes.
The social media problem isn’t going to be solved by treating it like cigarettes. It’s solved by teaching kids how moderate their use of it. And that only comes with practice. So banning it for children and then expecting them to use it responsibly once they have access is unrealistic.
I am not sure if you genuinely don't see what you miss or if you purposely ignore it because it helps your argument.
Nobody says "we ban it for children and then expect them to use it responsibly". Just like for cigarettes. It's never responsible to smoke, it's just that we as a society choose to let adults stink and ruin their health if they want to. But for kids, we a society believe that they are vulnerable and may smoke without realising how stupid and unhealthy it is, so we want to protect them until they reach an age where it becomes harder to justify preventing people from taking those stupid decisions.
For social media it's exactly the same: the goal is to protect the children while they are vulnerable, until they reach an age where it becomes harder to justify. Not that many (most?) adults are wasting a big part of their life swiping utterly stupid stuff on their smartphone, but banning social media for adults is a completely different discussion.
The thing is, if a kid is the only one in their class to not have a smartphone or to not have access to social media, they are in an uncomfortable situation and that puts pressure on the parents to give them access to those, so that they can conform. A big part of being a kid is to conform: being an outlier is a risk. One reason for age verification is to prevent enough kids to access social media, such that "the norm" is suddenly not to have access to social media anymore.
You can disagree with that, but at least you could acknowledge the argument instead of going around it and talking like if there was absolutely no way a sane person could imagine that banning social media for kids could ever be constructive.
What does national security even mean anymore? People are using this term for basically everything these days, as if saying "national security" is somehow a justification on its own.
What "national security" implications are there with VPNs?
> What "national security" implications are there with VPNs?
"Foreign agents" communicating in an untraceable way.
All internet communication is wiretapped by default unless you use a VPN to a rival jurisdiction. (Where it's also wiretapped, but presumably the interplay of state actor interests comes up in the "foreign agent"'s favor.)
"National security" has long been their favorite cheat code for 'do what I say, you can't question it, damn it!'. The boy who cried wolf has nothing on the old man who cried national security.
> What "national security" implications are there with VPNs?
Clearly, Big Government can't see what you or your company are doing and that's a problem for them.
"So you're implying..."
No.
> VPN is a national security issue
:/
What makes you think they aren't? The Double-Irish-Dutch-Sandwich in particular was cracked down on.
To be replaced by the Irish tax department making direct deals that are essentially the same. But ONLY for specific companies (principle: big multinationals don't pay tax at all, local companies get big tax raises. Irish companies are dying, multinationals are moving to Ireland)
https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/ireland/corporate/tax-credits-a...
In case anyone wonders: this means the FANG companies don't pay tax in Ireland if they hire enough people in Ireland, which has famously high income tax. It is, in other words, effectively a massive tax increase on the employees while actually reducing total tax income in the EU compared to the "double dutch sandwich".
Note that Ireland signed at least 2 international treaties that they weren't going to do this (OECD minimum tax treaty, EU tax treaty). Of course, there are no consequences to this.
The response to is that EU is exploring company-tax-per-transaction which is so incredibly bad in the massive administrative burden it will generate. It's not final, but it will mean that for every transaction done companies will have to keep (PER transaction) pieces (plural) of evidence for what country they happened in. Every single transaction.
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/projects-and-acti...
Lots of governments give tax exemptions to selected industries (film comes to mind) or even companies (Foxconn/TSMC); I don’t support this behavior, but I don’t see what makes Ireland special in this regard.
Well, that was the original question of the thread:
> How come tax loopholes aren't as scrutinized?
And the answer is simple: because countries sabotage each other's tax income when they can, even within unions (like US or EU, hell I'm told it even exists in Russia).
And with mobile capital, like multinationals, they can.
Ireland violated international treaties, multiple, to do this. Oh and they call it a huge success (despite that this will obviously suddenly crash and burn when other countries either block it or give better deals).
Oh and it cements the power of American multinationals over local EU companies, when the Irish government publicly and loudly claims they intend the opposite, and for reasons I don't understand, people seem to actually believe them.
Just the fact that it takes NGOs and journalists to uncover tax evasion practices. The governments and tax offices aren't looking. CumEx was a scandal in 2017, and despite being known since 1992, has only recently led to just a handful of prosecutions.
Cumex was not a tax loophole it was straight up fraud .
So imagine the enthusiasm of chasing "legal" practices.
And CumEx is still being gleefully practiced by some in the upper echelons with smaller values. Literally no-one cares if you're rich and connected, apparently.
A tax "loophole" is just a deliberate policy you happen to disagree with.
Why? Isn't your age verified when you renew your drivers license? Purchase something on Amazon?
When I was a kid, child programming and commercials were heavily scrutinized. Now any kid can access porn, violence, and scams on the internet. That's a blight. Not age verification.
I don’t understand, did broadcast TV or cable do age verification? Surely kids could watch content that was for adults very easily.
Broadcast TV had a very simple solution to this problem: Only air the not-for-kids stuff at times of the day when the kids are already asleep, i.e. late in the evening or at night.
It was still the job of the parents to set the bed times etc, but at least this was something the parents could actually control.
And for pay-per-view stations with actual heavily violent or pornographic content: Yes, they were absolutely age-gated, usually via a PIN.
and who sets that pin? It's the parents, not the cable company.
This is correct. I think the difference is that the PIN actually is an effective tool that parents can use to keep their kids from watching this stuff. It's also default-deny as the PIN is pre-set, and the parents would have to make a conscious efforts to allow viewing.
Im contrast, the internet is default-permit: Everyone can access everything, unless the device is specifically set up to block it. Setting up such a block has the risk of causing massive drama with your kids, and they fill probably quickly find ways to circumvent it anyway.
This is why I find the "it's the parent's responsibility" calls so hypocritical: The whole idea behind the internet is to make it as hard as possible to block things. But suddenly we expect the parents to do exactly that? How?
(All that independent of the point that the current push for age verification really seems like a disguised push for control. But that doesn't mean there isn't a real problem. Both things can be true at the same time)
As a kid, you never found a stack of porno magazines in the woods did you?
> Now any kid can access porn, violence, and scams on the internet.
Before Internet they used paper.
Before the Internet you had to work fairly hard to get a Playboy centerfold where the model just had her breasts out. Now you can effortlessly find endless depictions of anything, including the most depraved sex acts you can possibly imagine. The ease of access and breadth of content available to kids today makes it qualitatively different than when we were kids.
That does not, of course, mean that age verification laws are the appropriate solution. You could even argue that it's not a problem that kids have access to all this stuff (though I don't think I would agree with that). But you can't just hand wave it away by saying "we looked at porn on paper when we were kids". The situations are not at all the same.
The ease of access, quantity and diversity of internet porn is in no common measure with magazines that existed in the 20th century.
That’s the job of parents. No exceptions. OP is right, it needs to be outlawed.
And yet juvenile crime rate is down. Bullying is down. Teenage pregnancy is way down. Even underage smoking and drinking is down.
Maybe porn and violence is making today's teenager behave better than those 30 years ago after all!
How can you define a tax loophole then? Since there isn't a thing you can do called a "Tax loophole", but rather a collection of otherwise totally legitimate practices, just used as an optimization, they are impossible to define, and as such, be scrutinized. It's a neverending whack-a-mole...
I have a question that's been going through my mind -
Why is age verification connected with identity verification?
I understand why the former is not possible with the latter, but my question is -
Whichever entity is responsible for the verification can just pass on the age verification confirmation without passing through any of the other details, right?
Am I mistaken here? Because if this was possible, I could still go ahead with using the VPN.
This seems to be what "double-blind" verification is doing:
> The report highlights emerging approaches, such as “double-blind” verification systems used in France, where websites receive only confirmation that a user meets age requirements without learning the user's identity, while the verification provider does not see which websites the user visits.
It's a question of blind trust in your government to respect this, when they themselves control the age verification apps, at least in the EU who wants to impose its own system and not rely on an autonomous third party.
It is cryptography. Just like you don't have to blindly trust Signal with end-to-end encryption (their client app is open source), it could be implemented in a way that you don't need to blindly trust your government.
> Why is age verification connected with identity verification?
With the EU's current approach, disconnecting the two is the exact point. There is no third party, the government ID you already have can be used to verify your age directly with an online service.
You are right, it is possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. Feels like most people being very vocal against the idea don't know about that.
At least most complaints I see here are assuming that age verification means tracking.
Too bad, there could be interesting discussions about privacy-preserving age verification, if people just bothered getting informed before complaining.
We already have privacy preserving age verification: the website asks for your age (or just whether you're over 18), and lets you through.
There's no issuing party to collude with to deanonymize users, no hard requirement on owning a Google- or Apple-vetted smartphone, and generally no way to identify me besides my choice of random numbers.
You move past that, and people rightfully tell you that your scheme outright breaks privacy, or that it makes too many assumptions or is too complex to easily verify it actually preserves privacy.
> You move past that, and people rightfully tell you that your scheme outright breaks privacy, or that it makes too many assumptions or is too complex to easily verify it actually preserves privacy.
Encryption is too complex to easily verify it actually protects your data. Still you use it all the time without even knowing it.
From a tech perspective it has been a solved problem since about a decade ago, via DID (decentralised identities) and their Verifiable Proofs.
The EU digital wallet framework is built around those, and your suggested scenario is a first class citizen.
It is now moving from the academic/research world, to the political field, and feedback/pressure from both commercial groups and political agendas is muddling the field.
Here are some links to canonical docs, you can easily find high quality videos that explain this is shorter/simpler terms to get a grasp of it.
https://www.w3.org/TR/did-1.0/
https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/
A note: it’s one of the healthy byproducts of the blockchain age, don’t get sidetracked by some hyped videos from crypto bros.
It's a "solved problem" that didn't ever need solving in the first place.
Preserving privacy within a rule based democracy is important to me.
This is the foundational tool for 450 million EU citizens, so I think is very important.
We likely have different interests.
Buying alcohol online without having to show a website or a delivery driver my social security number is a challenge that needs solving. Same with picking up expensive parcels from package drop-off points in my country.
You can debate whether setting up such a system for things like social media is a necessity or desired in the first place, but being able to show someone a QR code that verifies my name and age without exposing all kinds of other details about me is extremely useful.
If any EU government people are reading this, I'd like to send you a short message:
Please stop thinking about the kids on the internet. But here's a brief list of things you must work on with higher urgency:
- taxing more large corporations,
- taxing more ultra-rich people,
- funding EU-made (open source) tech and infrastructure,
- let parents spend more time with their kids so they can actually protect their offspring and keep them safe from predators, more than any stupid law you think you can devise can do,
- more trains.
This! More taxes and - yes - more state-controlled tech! Wait. Why stop there? Let’s just bring back the SED and the Stasi too. Also, prevent people (the rich? yeah!) leaving Europe too with big walls [1]! I love your ideas comrade! LOL. Seriously, you should read more history books (and read it to your kiddos while you're at it, please). Peace.
[1] German men must ask the army for permission to leave country - https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15706287/German-men-a...
Ah, sorry if "parents spending more time with their kids" is a too extreme and communist view.
I am sure that the problem of current EU is not lack of excesive taxation.
I don't think that from my comment anyone can infer that I'm opposed to reducing general taxation. I'm, in fact, in favor in increasing taxes for who owns too much, not against reducing taxes to population with lower income.
Still, more tax burden for companies won’t make eu more competitive against the rest of the world. We need to dramatically cut down all the regulations, have a true one market, open capital market. I am still very much pro EU, but it needs to be reformed.
Honestly, I don't think the EU problem is taxation. Really, there's a long list of things that have higher precedence over that, for example, not being so immigration-adverse.
I don’t know where you live, but generally EU’s governments are much more in support of migration than their citizens. The big corporations want that cheap labour and they won’t pay the secondary cost.
Governments already have everyone's ID, including DOB. They say that the problem is non-adults accessing adult sites and services. So therefore, the sites need to know that users are over 18 (or the selected government age).
There should be a standardized government ID service/API that allows a person to let it disclose their age (or other user selected information) to a requesting site/service. That's all that is needed if the government ID service has appropriate 2FA and security.
Both the request and the response can be appropriately anonymized so that the government doesn't know the site, and the site doesn't know the person's identity.
Why isn't this a thing yet? As far as I know, no one has proposed it.
EU people are the poorest people of our world. Living in false pretense of being "free". The fancy pot on this fancy stove took a long time to reach boiling point. So long that the little frog inside did not even notice that it is the main course. Sometimes its too late to jump out of this pot.
Feels like its state vs man nowdays, worldwide. Don't let them mislead you.
Some EP commitee writes a report about some UK (not-EU) person stating "VPNs are a loophole that needs closing".
[Some argue] being a link to some UK websitehttps://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_AT...
People keep looking at the consumer privacy vpns , but there's a huge field of commercial vpn usage for a broad spectrum of tasks in the european union. Point to point tunnels connecting two sites into a single network. Allowing access to (corporate) resources via laptops and mobile devices. Fixing the one way nature of crappy internet that most people are forced to work with these days (or simply never realized), etc etc.
Basically if you want to do any sort of remote work, I'm not saying you're necessarily using one right now, but the odds are good. Possibly the politician's own IT back-end might have ... opinions... on the ability of the executive to overly check the legislative too.
Age restrictions + VPN bans + encryption restrictions + client-side monitoring + restricting general purpose computing.. It's just rapid descent into digital fascism set up by people who have no ability to see how the dots will end up connecting.
There was a time that parents control what websites children can access.
Now there is a time politicians control what websites we can access.
So a research arm of the European parliament is "the EU" now?
They can't do it.
They need a referendum since it affects people's security and well being.
EU is a tyrrant.
I guess the basic way to do this is to make VPNs age restricted.
I'm not as bearish on all this as most people here. I don't see much use for age restriction, except maybe keeping preteens off social media. That said, the proposed verification tech is very private, as far as I can tell. My review was cursory, though. Also, each EU member is free to use a different technical solution. Of course they're free to not make age verification obligatory at all. This programme is meant to be a strong default legislative and technical framework: it can't make EU members do something.
VPN usage increased, but how to they draw the conclusion that this is children. I think it's more likely that adults are using VPNs to not have to deal with the ID process. I would do that.
As VPNs usually cost some money, which is already a barrier for minors.
We desperately need a new internet
The internet is not the nice place it used to be with personal blogs. When we get younger employees they almost cannot work because of their phone addictions.
There is billions of research going into making children addicted through the window of their phone screen to watch apps, and now with AI this is getting even more dangerous.
It's not only children, also many elderly people are targeted. They are very lonely and then develop a Claude addiction.
Over my dead internet connection.
VPN for the VPN with a back-up VPN for the VPN's VPN.
Ugh. Here we go again. Europe’s politicians just cannot stop with wanting to control everyone and everything. It’s as if bureaucracy is the actual goal. Privacy and anonymity should be protected by law. Not violated by law.
The lobbyists are doing what they are paid to do.
People pointed that out quite a while ago already. Age sniffing is a joint attack on the freedoms of people, which explains why these lobbyists also try to abolish VPNs. Their vision for the world wide web is one of authorization. Ultimately they will fail, but a few get rich here in the process.
EU is totalitarian. If Europeans want to have a chance of protecting what's left of their freedoms, there's no other way than dissolving EU completely. It's not possible to reform that monster.
It's very easy to fall in this trap of "surveillance for the greater good".
It reminds me the Mullvad pub campaign: https://mullvad.net/en/and-then/uk
So the next step after that will be some DPI imposed on the ISP, aimed at detecting Tor and "invisible" or private VPNs...
How come being that corrupt pays off so well when you're a politician.
Ah yes, the most pressing issue of our times. Mandatory surveillance of every person's activities is a reasonable solution to the critical issue of teenagers watching porn, who totally won't be able to bypass this by... grabbing Dad's phone.
Obviously, it's not about the children. It was never about the children. If I had my way every one of these people would be taken to a gulag, because they are evil, have evil intentions, and blatantly lie to further their evil goals. I am tired of the intolerant being tolerated, and by allowing this to fester we are headed for a much worse totalitarian dystopia.
I wonder, if you ask a local LLM to access a forbidden site, from within Russia or China, can it figure out a way to do so, out of the box?
VPNs are essential tools against government persecution. Linking identity to a VPN session under any guise (age verification or otherwise) is something out of the playbook of dictatorial states.
Personal freedom research service calls EU Parliament an abuser that needs heavy restriction on their actions and scope.
Well, we have to remember that the mankind natural state is slavery, a 200-year period of democracy was an anomaly that is now self-correcting.
When the surveillance state wants to ban VPN's, we know their backdoors aren't as effective as they would like.
Terrible headline. The EPRS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliamentary_Researc...) said a thing, not the EU.
Also, the EPRS did not argue that they are a loophole that needs closing.
From the actual paper:
> Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place.
The "some argue" is a link; it turns out that 'some' here is the Children's Commissioner for England, a post with, AIUI, only an advisory role in the UK, and obviously not even that in the EU.
If my kid can setup a VPN, then he's old enough.
The western great fire wall is reducing its scope..
Perhaps these legislators are addicted to porn and don't want their children to do to themselves the same they have done. Would explain their obsession and relentlessness to get this done.
It's just a pity they are destroying the internet while doing that. They should be attacking the companies making money from porn instead.
And by the way porn can damage your mind even after 18 so age verification is not a real solution anyway.
Maybe the problem is trying to govern a global space with sub-global governments.
Y'all see the plan though, right? Control the internet. Remove e2e encryption. Control/stifle dissent and uprisings.
The plan is to replace the 99% with machines. It doesn't matter to the 1% if you survive their glorious, great filter.
The great filter is billionaires. It's a billionaire control problem, not a superintelligence control problem. You're livestock. There's a better ox and cart that just pulled down the gravel road.
North Korea calls VPNs “a loophole that needs closing” in age verification push
The China gap is going to zero, yet slave masses still sleep...