> There's a lot more to KOSA than just the "duty of care" requirement. But basically, all of it comes down to the same fundamental flaw. At the heart of KOSA—an

> There's a lot more to KOSA than just the "duty of care" requirement. But basically, all of it comes down to the same fundamental flaw. At the heart of KOSA—and so many online child "protection" bills—is the pretense that it's possible to eradicate problems associated with young people if only big tech companies would do better. > > Online bullying is bad, of course. But bullying in general is bad, and bullying existed long before the internet. So did teens with eating disorders, problematic media habits, mental health issues, and risky or dumb decisions regarding sex and intoxicating substances. Ok, I call "logical fallacy" on this argument. However bad KOSA is, the quoted text feels a bit like saying "we'll never prevent all crime, so we will abolish the police and stop prosecuting _any_ crime". If there's a political amount-of-crime lever, you might never be able to pull it all the way over, but you very much can nudge it a little bit in either direction. A properly written and thought out bill would not eradicate, but reduce, the cited problems, and it would make big tech, social media and advertising companies do a lot better than the worst excesses we see nowadays. There's a good argument that KOSA is not that bill, but to the extent that the quoted argument would also apply to a better thought out bill, I find the argument overly generalizing and invalid. Or, for another example, gun crime exists all over the world (organised crime will always find a way - the Yakuza manage it even in Japan). But it's certainly the case that some countries have a lot more gun crimes than others. This argument is essentially saying that even if we had Japan's gun laws, there'd still be some gun crime, which is true but misses the point that there wouldn't be the same amount of gun crime. Bullying existed before the internet, but the internet has certainly enabled new kinds of bullying, and it's possible the internet has drastically increased the amount of bullying. Eating disorders existed before the internet, forums where you upload a photo and others tell you you're definitely fat and should kill yourself, not so much. It annoys me when someone tries to shoot down a low-quality bill with an equally low-quality argument. We can do better than this.