Super annoying!

Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites), the incentives hint this was strongly supported by legacy media (90% of Aussie media is owned by two companies, Newscorp and Nine Entertainment).

The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms. And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). (I've long said, to try to think clearly after watching 'the news' is akin to trying to operate heavy machinery after consuming alcohol).

The kids in my family were well protected and supervised, they got into contact with hardcore porn at the age of 6 when other kids had access to smartphones and exposed them to it.

I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.

In my 20s I was promiscious and lived what I saw in pornography, only later in life I learned about normal sex.

In germany we had a state sponsored porn flick once produced by ZDF Neo, maybe that is the approach to expose the kids to material that shows sex as a respectable flow rather than an extreme fantasy.

My favourite and most out-of-touch part of the article was the one in which they argue it is "a fallacy" to think pornography can be harmful to teenagers because "research into pornography’s impact on children is limited and inconclusive — prompting calls for further study". I actually laughed out loud at this part

But of course that's not what it's about.

Online age verification and content moderation was never about protecting anyone. It's about controlling the masses and tricking them into believing that it's for their own good.

It's hurting their own case by giving the EU commission the easiest retort imaginable. If you really don't want age verification, that's bad, because they usually get the last word in.

Better to respond in good faith to the commission's strongest possible argument, rather than do this, which is going to get brushed aside while handing them a win.

Introducing laws that are going to be relatively trivially circumvented, which do not provide the protection they purport to provide, and which burden citizens with rather useless but onerous duties, should be called out as a failure at lawmaking. I think the best defense against such laws is to show thoroughly why and how bad and useless such laws are, so that large enough political constituencies (that is, us, citizens) would become interested in fixing or repealing them, and would vote accordingly.

Seems like porn VPN would be popular.

That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)

> Device-level parental controls have existed for years, and can actually block a million sites. But politicians can’t take credit for them.

Who's "us"? This blog doesn't seem to have an About Us.

They'll just get it somewhere else, private chatrooms, torrents, etc and from probably even less regulated and more nefarious sources that also serve stuff super hardcore or completely illegal.

Providing a BGP feed of such provider network subnets to content providers would then allow them to happily serve content to those subnets without any further checks, safe in the knowledge that they will only be providing service to endpoints controlled by adults.

Details of how this can be done for other services including home broadband omitted - suffice it to say your router would have both adult and child-friendly SSIDs.

This seems both simple and obvious, and protects children without encumbering adults, risking privacy, or forcing a mass censorship regime on everyone.

This means it isn't enough to verify the age of an account once. If all you need are verified accounts you just created a black market for verfied accounts.

That means you need to verify the identity of the actual person sitting in front of the screen with regularity. And that is problematic in various ways.

Porn is partially protected by the constitution and it is politically impopular to tell people what they can't do.

Surely, if this is about "show me an ID", one can grab his parent's

If this is about "show me your face", again this seems stupid at best (how one can detect that this is an adult face, especially between 17 yo vs 19 yo)

So .. how does it work ? And also, does it work ? :)

Your local adult video store can't sell to minors. They have to check id. If they don't, and a minor buys some goods, the store is liable.

Your local strip club can't let minors into their doors. They have to check id. If they don't, and a minor gains entry, the club is liable.

The same applies to all age-restricted products everywhere, online or offline. I can't buy liquor on doordash without showing ID for crying out loud.

But for some (probably nefarious) reason, online adult content providers want to pretend the rule doesn't apply to them. Device-level controls? Hilarious. What... are we going to add device-controls to a teenager's car to prevent them from driving to liquor stores too?

Don't get me wrong, there's some shady stuff behind AV. But I strongly disagree with the notion that an adult content provider isn't responsible for restricting their content in a way that works.

I don't like it, but for the most part the internet is now a better place for me to browse.

> But that comparison is dishonest: on a gambling or merchant site, users already expect to submit personal data — credit card info, name, phone number, address. They are paying for something. On a free site, users do not expect to hand over private data. They simply refuse — and move on to other sites. Why wouldn’t they?

the success of OnlyFans destroys this argument. It is not that people do not pay for porn - the authors try to uphold their free, ad-based model. But looking at OnlyFans, people absolutely seem to be OK submitting their personal data incl. payment details.

Instead of age verification, I'd rather see a discussion on how to make a form of ethical porn more visible and popular than the one which involves sex trafficking, sexism and violent or degrading practices. I'd rather see good porn more accessible to teenager than letting them use workarounds and visit terrible stuff.

For all these things, we rely on people's world experience and common sense to figure it out. I think it's pretty obvious that sex is not like porn, and I don't understand why so many people are convinced that people can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality in this domain specifically.

Only if they have no other exposure to this pretty damn normal thing. If all the adults in their life refuse to talk about because of some misplaced idea it is shameful, where are they going to get that info?

Not saying that’s the case for you, just that it’s the impression I get from many people.

There’s a bunch of studies on this and at the individual level it seems to do a bunch of stuff, but at the population level it has at most an effect so small it can’t be measured. Which IMO suggests causation goes in the other direction. IE if you’re entering puberty early you may seek both porn and sex at a younger age.

That said, I’m not an expert and have only briefly looked through the literature.

Looking at this comment thread, I get the sense that people are coming from vastly different backgrounds and upbringings. There's no baseline established for what people are trying to discuss.

There are a lot of topics that should simply be explained to children up front from a very early age. When a topic is not shrouded in mystery, it becomes boring. So kids should learn from an early age what is sex, puberty, menstruation, homosexuality, etc. and it should be presented in a manner-of-fact way that takes the emotional charge out of the picture. When people are educated, they have more latitude to make good decisions.

News flash. That is normal in your 20s and always has been.

Such as mandatory site filtering options. So the same place you pay your bill, you can also set which sites you want to be blocked by an "admin" password.

Or are they afraid that people will add tracking.facebook.com to the block list?

The chances of the kids stealing the admin password are about as likely as the kids stealing your age verification password that you needed to set up to access Reddit.

Honestly I'm really surprised that the generation that grew up on free access to internet porn and turned out fine is suddenly acting so prudish. As a kid I really believed that when my generation grows up, we'll be "the cool parents".

Of course porn distorted my view of sex, but let's be real - this damage is absolutely nothing compared to American family movies where a family of four with one adopted token black kid has a minor issue and then resolves it and everyone lives happily everafter. Those sold me the fantasy that as an adult I'd have lots of friends and a loving family and a satisfying job, and when none of that happened, I spent years feeling deep disappointment, which I still haven't processed.

Meanwhile hardcore porn I watched... look, that's the absolute least of issues I had as a kid. Growing up gay in a conservative country never gave me a chance to learn about proper relationships, I was immediately pushed into the underground world of hookups with shady people. Not to mention the plethora of other, unrelated issues, like constant bullying at school which nobody gave a fuck about, abusive parents, or ghetto community promoting criminal lifestyle. Or thinking even larger: what about whole generation that enters job market into recession, what about whole generation that will never build capital because they're trapped in a cycle of poverty, what about the constant fear that WW3 might be happening, what about social connections dissolving and people becoming more and more aggressive towards each other.

But those are difficult problems to tackle, so let's focus on kids seeing a naked titty instead. For sure that's a great use of our limited time.

It's extremely difficult to get solid evidence of this stuff, as it all happens so slowly it's inseparable from many other gradual forces in society.

Are people getting married and having children less, because porn has undermined their ability to form healthy adult relationships?

Or is it because of a successful campaign against teen pregnancy? A rise in women's education levels making them want to wait to start a family? Contraception and pre-marital sex removing a major incentive to settle down? Society's infantilisation of men, who should put away childish things at a much younger age? A housing crisis and hollowing out of the lower middle class meaning people can't hope to afford a family home until middle age? A preference the man out-earns the woman being incompatible with a world where women out-perform men in education? Fears about the future, like the climate crisis? A decline in religion and traditional family values? The rise of online/app-based dating?

Our main tools for disentangling these influences are, as far as I can tell, vibes and anecdotes.

1) Not everybody would know how to do it 2) This creates a weakest link problem, where in a class of say 15 kids, just having one with a non-blocked device would allow for all to see.

I don't know what would be good solution, maybe something intermediate... for example, filtering at the ISP level and making it mandatory for them to inform and request the settings for all their customers? Just a form, so they can block it. But then, maybe I want to block porn for my underage kids but not for me or my partner.

We will be barred from accessing sites without valid ID. The question is can we get a few IdPs to provide the ID in a privacy sensitive way (the relying party really only needs to know your age after all).

Ideally an international governing body, under the auspices of the UN, holds the IDs and transmits the specific claims when requested and keeps no logs on requests.

Realistically it will be Apple and Google and you'll just have to trust them to totally not use the data of what sites request your ID to track you (lmao. lol, even.)