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...
Mandatory age verification online is a blight imho. It should be outlawed.