We talk about legislative solutions as if they exist in a bubble. Like there’s some idealized body of completely rational actors who will deliberately evaluate

We talk about legislative solutions as if they exist in a bubble. Like there’s some idealized body of completely rational actors who will deliberately evaluate all the features of an issue and make a decision that will benefit everyone in aggregate. This is not how legislatures work. They are filled with imperfect humans who rarely have technical training. They should not be making decisions in a bubble. In theory you could implement age based access controls, but as the article points out, these are full of tradeoffs, and none of them are good. You will either get vendor lock in, violations of constitutional rights, a wider dispersal of Personally identifiable information, or a poorly thought through government implemented solution whose only feedback is additional legislation. Parental desires to prevent children from seeing inappropriate content is not strictly opposed to individual free speech rights, the need for dynamism and open competition in the marketplace, or a need for privacy and information security. To say these issues need to be balanced would be a false dichotomy. Perhaps the solution is for society to respect parents by giving them the resources they need, through paid parental leave and employment protections.