The demand comes from people who value their children’s perceived safety over the ability of some internet perv to get at porn or for terrorists to plan atrocit

The demand comes from people who value their children’s perceived safety over the ability of some internet perv to get at porn or for terrorists to plan atrocities. And no, they don’t want to hear about the importance of freedom to communicate being more important boy. I’m just gonna move this road we go do you wanna go out that way okay, because they believe that their communication will never cross these lines, so it’s irrelevant. “But what if the government turns bad and uses this against you” carries far less weight, in a large part due to its theoretical nature, than “we need to stop this bad thing now”. Heck, a lot of the governments likely aren’t thinking beyond “we need to stop this bad thing now so people vote for us” either. The immediate leap from governments wanting any form of oversight to “this is all part of the wider plan to subjugate humanity” that often comes up on this site is amusing but ultimately unhelpful and comes across as conspiratorial. Not because it’s wrong exactly, but because it posits a plan where it’s not very clear there is one. It’s just well intentioned people making well intentioned but poor choices as we stumble our way into mediocrity.