Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think it should be highly regulated.
I think billboards should be completely banned, or at most relegated to designated districts of dense urban areas. I'm in favor of banning products that are addictive or harmful to people, like gambling, tobacco, and the like. I think that conflicts of interest should be disclosed, and false claims should have consequences.
But I think it's helpful to start the discussion by recognizing that the state that we're in now is the natural state of affairs. It's not evil, and we all engage in elements of it most of our waking lives. But unchecked marketing and persuasion will flood every crack of everything if you let it. Which is why you have to decide what you are willing to permit as a society.
It has to be done coercively, though. The incentives are so unbelievably strong to cheat that shame or persuasion isn't a useful counterweight.
Yes, of course, there's often dishonest or misleading or exploitative marketing.
But that's not really what the problem is, since marketing would still be annoying even with that solved. The problem is much more akin to a tragedy of the commons type of thing, where, when everyone is shouting, you can't hear what you want to hear. Usually, that's the thing that bothers people. Billboards, unsolicted emails, etc.
I think for people who really get annoyed at marketing it helps to take a couple of steps back and look at how we fit into the natural world, everything that frustrates you about human society is something you'll find an analog for.
Things like brightly colored frogs that are poisonous, fur spots that look like eyeballs looking backwards, peacocks, bugs that looks like sticks, etc.
All of these are what's called emergent behavior, and they're intrinsic to all complex adaptive systems, like natural ecosystems, and human society itself.
Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things.
You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.
There have always been layers of abstraction. I've been around for a while, and when I was a kid, the two choices I remember seeing were assembly code and simple semantic languages like BASIC.
Assembly seemed like too cryptic for me to really even follow and I never really did learn it, but at the time I remember people would say that assembly was easy and basically plain English compared to machine code.
As recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, I would occasionally check in and think of how unbelievably far away we had gotten from how the computer actually works. Like, you can just write "open window" and a window opens. Amazing.
Of course, those people writing machine code didn't need to really understand what P and N were in a transistor, let alone how an integrated circuit pulls it all together. And I'm not sure how much those guys knew about silicon dioxide.
The more complex things get and the more layers of abstraction there are, the more impossible it gets to really master things all the way down to first principles.
So what? People can carve out whatever chunk of the stack they want to really understand if they want to focus their lives on it. And for everyone else who's just trying to accomplish some other goal with computers as the tool, they will naturally use the highest level of abstraction and the simplest one for them to use, which is exactly what they should do.
That does not seem to be an accurate description of what has happened here.
What it looks like is someone with significant biochemical experience and a Harvard PhD has created some kind of drug or chemical that he thinks will be effective for treating Alzheimer's, and that he mentions using Claude Code to help him program some of the complex chemical engineering machines that he used along the way.
You have convinced me that there are in fact no differences between things, and that protecting children from adult content is indistinguishable from stealing from people, and therefore I was foolish to advocate for it.
> I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet.
For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids.
Because we live in a society.
If you struggle to understand why that matters without reference to more direct personal stakes for yourself, just know that without a society, the children will grow up to rape you, kill you, and possibly consume you for your protein content.
> If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet
Of course I have an answer. To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.
There's literally nothing confusing about the "why" in this discussion.
The fact that bad people use the "what about the children" argument regularly for bad reasons doesn't mean that all such arguments are bogus.
In fact, it's an indication of exactly the opposite, it's so regularly used because there is a broad consensus that we need to protect children from harm which is why it's often effective as an arguing tool.
The relevant frame for this discussion is will it actually work, and what are the tradeoffs. A trivially small amount of money for a simple age verification scheme isn't a particularly meaningful tradeoff against a genuine social problem. The bigger, more genuine issues are around privacy and censorship and I do in fact concede those are real.
I'm not disowning it at all. I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.
You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.
It just doesn't matter. It's not important. It's consistent with how we organize our society in general, which makes focusing on it in this one particular instance more understandable as an attempt to distract from the substantive merits of these arguments about age verification.
I mean, if you really want to make the government subsidize an ID verification scheme or mandate that certain real-world locations provide age verification as a social service for everyone, that's fine.
It's orthogonal to the discussion, though, which is about whether we should do it or not, because the costs here aren't significant and don't change the terms of the debate.
If you call pornograpy and violence delivery to children "providing them with information" then sure but most normal people just consider that a bad thing that we'd like to avoid and definitely would like to stop sociopathic tech CEO's from exploiting for profit.
But back to your original point, it's a pretty well-established function of government to protect the children within its borders from being harmed.
There are still places in the world where you and your family can literally fend for yourself against nature and rival gangs and so on if you're just super attached to the concept though, it's not like this option has been foreclosed.
You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on. So there is an intrinsic cost to prove who you are where you are from and what your birthday is already.
You have to pay for all sorts of small things to participate in normal society. This isn't a serious criticism.
By definition this is not a life critical thing, it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.
This comment should not be downvoted. The original article lost me in the first sentence with this:
"The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet"
Sorry, but a firehose of unlimited pornography, violence, racist, misogynist, and divisive content for developing children is bad. You can "well actually..." me all day I don't care at all.
I agree that there's no good solutions here, and I think this is a genuinely complicated and difficult issue for exactly the reasons people often state. But every argument that pretends that it's a one-sided discussion should be dismissed out of hand. There are two sides to this, both thorny.
I think billboards should be completely banned, or at most relegated to designated districts of dense urban areas. I'm in favor of banning products that are addictive or harmful to people, like gambling, tobacco, and the like. I think that conflicts of interest should be disclosed, and false claims should have consequences.
But I think it's helpful to start the discussion by recognizing that the state that we're in now is the natural state of affairs. It's not evil, and we all engage in elements of it most of our waking lives. But unchecked marketing and persuasion will flood every crack of everything if you let it. Which is why you have to decide what you are willing to permit as a society.
It has to be done coercively, though. The incentives are so unbelievably strong to cheat that shame or persuasion isn't a useful counterweight.