As much as Brexit was a footgun, this has always seemed to me a very valid criticism of the EU that the remain side of that debate never really tackled. There is a huge democratic deficit in the organisation.
The Council, made up of heads of state, set the direction.
The Commission, made up of whoever is nominated by those heads of state, usually some mate of theirs with no democratic accountability or mandate of their own (see: Peter Mandelson), is the body that decides on and creates legislation.
The Parliament, made up of the actually elected members, seems to exist just to rubber-stamp the output of the other bodies. Or occasionally not, but look what happened here, they were asked again until they did * .
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot that's good about the EU too, but it's in need of serious reform before it can claim to be a truly democratic set of bodies.
(* Which is incidentally another criticism of the EU, mostly centred around the time of the Lisbon treaty, which was first put forward as the new EU constitution but, after rejection in some popular referenda in some countries, was renamed the Lisbon Treaty and pushed through again. In the UK this caused waves because the populace was not asked at all about the treaty and Gordon Brown was reported to have snuck-off and signed it into law on the quiet)
> Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.
I rented a car in the UK about six weeks ago, and this was infuriating!
No, car, this is not a 30 zone. It's a 60 zone and I'm driving to the conditions (country road, decent visibility, slightly poor surface) at around 45. Whatever GPS data or image recognition techniques you're using, you're broken, shut up and leave me alone.
I did eventually find the button to turn it off but (as the article mentions) I had to do that every single journey.
I believe that in this case an imperfect system is worse than no system at all, because it adds to the distractions.
If you read the link, that’s not necessarily how things have to work. You can make limited-use ZK schemes, plus you fall into the usual trap of binary thinking, that if something isn’t 100% effective it is necessarily 0%.
Just outside Perth, WA. I pay for 400Mbps 'fixed wireless', which became available last year (prior to that it was capped at 250). On a good day I get 200/14.
Starlink was approximately the same at a similar pricepoint but I switched to NBN because hey, Elon doesn't need my money and at least I have an alternative now.
That's not the argument here, the argument is that the free market delivers value, but only when it's well set up.
According to the article, US has effectively enshrined local fiefdoms for ISPs, so free market competition just doesn't take hold there. In contrast, Switzerland allows competing ISPs direct access to common last-mile infrastructure, and the free market forces there have incentivised better products and better prices.
The free market does work, when given the right rails.
I don't know how well it translates to the EU countries, but there seems to be this idea in the UK that air conditioning is a decadent frivolity, and really only for the weak.
And yes it does seem to get singled out as bad for global warming, which is odd as people in the UK most often use gas to heat their houses, where AC is very efficient and can use electricity from whatever source. It also works as very energy-efficient heating in winter.
> Unless you're using the "Two or more people get together to plan something" definition of the word "conspiracy" -which happens to neatly cover planning to go to lunch-, I don't consider this to be a conspiracy.
Yes that's the entire point of this whole thread, congrats for getting there in the end.
You don't consider this a conspiracy.
People like the article author do, and in doing so they miss the mark on having any effect on the wider conversation because they aren't willing to even acknowledge the existence of the problem. You are actually engaging with the topic and putting forwards ideas and engaging with solutions. You have thoughts about how something might be made to work. You are not who I1 am complaining about.
(As an aside, why not actually try reading the link about anonymous credentials? It's very informative and it shows you what's possible even if you're too cynical to believe anyone would ever implement it)
Everyone is free to make up their mind and vote for what they believe.
And if I disagree strongly enough then I am free to take my business elsewhere. Especially if the money I hand over might go to support speech and parties I fundamentally disagree with.
Freedom swings both ways, and freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from people thinking you're an asshole and not wanting anything to do with you. That's their freedom.
The part that I quoted? That would be quite a feat. Either way I think it's definitely a choice to entirely ignore what a country is doing in this area due to historical reasons, when the country you're interested in making changes to appears to be doing worse.
> Mmm. No, there are three systems being described here.
There are more than three options here. Here are more possibilities (already in use in some places) -
4. Service providers make an informed guess about who might be a kid, based on usage patterns and scanning the pictures they've uploaded.
5. Anonymous credentials systems, as described in the link in my first post that you responded to.
Neither of these is a 'papers please' solution.
> your apparent confusion about the need to send some information to the services servers is -itself- confusing.
So you're also implicitly ignoring solution 6, which a lot of people elsewhere in this thread are arguing for, which is parents using existing parental control systems built into their devices, which work 100% client side?
> I'm 100% for guardian-controlled content-restriction policies.
That's age verification of a sort by the guardian, enforced server-side. So no, you're not against these systems in principle, you're just proposing a solution that you find palatable.
> Anyone who should know about "Parental Controls" and chooses "Papers Please!" or "Age Please!" is evil.
Why? Parental controls at the moment are patchy, poorly understood and certainly don't operate in the way you're proposing they should in future. It's easy to see why people might declare that such schemes are inadequate.
I am finding it very funny that you are determined to put yourself in the category of "People Nursie disagrees with because they dismiss the entire thing as a conspiracy", even while you're not actually doing that, you're arguing in good faith and I applaud it!
> "You must honor the signals you get from Beefed-Up Parental Controls and we fine or jail you if you do not"
> If anything, I'd expect a client-side implementation to be far more robust...
You're not really describing a client-side solution, you're describing legislation of something like the old Do Not Track header, which is a server-side solution, and fines for services which don't respect it. In such a situation I would expect 'smart' firms like Meta to start finding just-this-side-of-legal ways to get kids hooked on their services. But I suppose the same is likely to happen with server-side-verified blocks on kids using services, Meta can spin up new services that don't quite meet the definition and try to work around it. I guess this is orthoganal to the method of blocking kids.
> from a civil-liberties perspective Australia has been a shithole for a long time now. They can very safely be ignored by US parents and US lawmakers.
Even though what they are doing is less "Papers please" and more "Services must verify, how it's done is up to you", which seems lower down your evil scale than the US states you're up in arms about?
Interesting take.
But again, this is fine, it's an exchange of ideas. You don't seem to be against age verification in principle, you're acknowledging that people want something done. The article and many commenters here are immediately writing off everything in this area as effectively a distraction from full monitoring of everything everyone does on the net.
So while we may disagree entirely on how to go about effecting any sort of solution, and we may not (honestly I'm not entirely averse to the parental controls idea), you're not dismissing the problem out of hand, and in general I have no quarrel with you or your approach.
I mean, 'papers please' mechanisms are a type of law and regulation, we're arguing over what sort of law and regulation should be used, no?
In Australia, platforms are being regulated, the regulation says they must not allow under 16s to have accounts. How they achieve this is up to them to a large extent. "Papers-please" then is their doing. It's certainly not the only way things can be done - see anonymous credentials, verifiable credentials and other such schemes that don't involve showing your identification documents to everyone that asks.
> You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.
An arms race to work around the controls, which seems likely to me unless there is some sort of regulation on the service providers.
But either way, look at this! We're discussing how things might work, rather than dismissing things out of hand and impugning each others' motives. Going to the "Papers please" governments and parents in those populations, saying "Look, we understand there is concern and we think there's a better way", or even "We understand the concern but here's why acting on it in any way is a bad idea" is a lot better than "You're all evil and probably stupid".
> If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS
Not everyone knows they exist, and there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.
> Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party
But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties? We know they've been cognisant of the harms and addictive behaviours their stuff promotes (see internal Meta research), and in fact seem to have designed for that. If the controls are only at the consumer side, are we not likely to see an arms race where they continue to try to addict kids around the controls?
You're also assuming a level of technical sophistication on the part of parents, voters and politicians that would necessarily lead them to come to the same conclusions as yourself about solutions. This may simply not be present.
This is what I mean by "good arguments that won't land". We can talk about how solutions should work, whether solutions can possibly work, and even make strong arguments that regulation in this area is wrong in and of itself. Jumping straight to "they're all liars and only want to spy on me" makes the entire thing look like a group of fringe nutters unable to take onboard how people (particularly non-tech people) feel.
You really only need the banners if you're doing privacy-impinging things.
Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.
Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse.
Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
It's funny how this played out in different countries.
In Australia there is no chance of anything happening, because the courts ruled that payouts were limited to provable incurred losses. You pirated a movie? The maximum awarded at the end of a court case is going to be about $20, and as you can't buy very much lawyer-time for $20, it's never taken to court and the copyright-holders have effectively stopped pursuing people here.
Yep, there are all sorts of technically interesting ways in which age can be proven without identity being compromised, this link has a good exploration of anonymous credentials, for a start - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their kids exposed to internet harms, be that extreme material or addictive services and doom-scrolling, and don't have the technical know-how to effect that themselves.
The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent and that there is no way to practically provide age verification in a thoughtful, anonymous way is frustrating.
It's frustrating to see so many people engaged in effective conspiratorial thinking and it's frustrating because there are many good arguments to be had here, but they won't land if the 'anti' side doesn't address the real concerns that real people have about the safety and mental health of their kids.
The Council, made up of heads of state, set the direction.
The Commission, made up of whoever is nominated by those heads of state, usually some mate of theirs with no democratic accountability or mandate of their own (see: Peter Mandelson), is the body that decides on and creates legislation.
The Parliament, made up of the actually elected members, seems to exist just to rubber-stamp the output of the other bodies. Or occasionally not, but look what happened here, they were asked again until they did * .
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot that's good about the EU too, but it's in need of serious reform before it can claim to be a truly democratic set of bodies.
(* Which is incidentally another criticism of the EU, mostly centred around the time of the Lisbon treaty, which was first put forward as the new EU constitution but, after rejection in some popular referenda in some countries, was renamed the Lisbon Treaty and pushed through again. In the UK this caused waves because the populace was not asked at all about the treaty and Gordon Brown was reported to have snuck-off and signed it into law on the quiet)