As an Australian it's so irritating how enthusiastic people are to give up their privacy and freedom of speech, and also force everyone to hand over personal information to private companies, on the flimsiest of pretexts from our perpetually technologically incompetent government.
After the number of data breaches we've seen, they want to do this, and in the least privacy-preserving way possible.
Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok? Nope, we'll just pick a few sites and force everyone to give them their data, what could go wrong?
And if you actually look at the suicide statistics, there's no epidemic of suicides going on...
It's just lazy parents who can't be bothered parenting looking for a quick fix. I want to hand my phone to little tommy and turn my brain off.
What's even more galling is that the quick fix with so many obvious negatives won't even fix anything. As a kid I had unlimited time to get around any blocks. It's so dumb.
4chan is perfectly fine, but reddit must be stopped! Just to be clear I don't think either should be blocked.
Make the entire internet 18+ only and put the parents who let kids on the net in jail, I don't care.
As a child I had unlimited time to work out how to access stuff that interested me, a lot of which was forbidden in some way, because that's the most interesting stuff!
In the process I learned about computers and eventually got a modem to access BBSes. It was exhilarating! I would have spent any amount of effort and time to access it.
I basically attribute my entire career to accessing stuff the puritans would have tried to prevent me from accessing.
Also, almost all of the porn I have came from private trackers.
I very much doubt they will be concerned with any of these rules. Things will just move more underground if that happens. And the more underground you go, the more unsavory stuff you might find.
But we all know this isn't actually about protecting children.
In a way, I hope that it ends up being a good thing because the whole clearnet should probably be nuked from orbit.
Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable. It's just the spam problem that is the hard thing to solve. Maybe reputation with proof of work could work.
I'll happily leave the normies to their milquetoast, corporate, manipulated existence.
America, you need to sort your shit out yesterday.