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Every single discussion I have with folks on this seemingly goes like this: “Does the child pay for internet access?” “No, but they have a device that can acc

Every single discussion I have with folks on this seemingly goes like this: “Does the child pay for internet access?” “No, but they have a device that can access the internet!” “Oh, so the child bought the device and paid the bill?” “No, the parents do!” “Ah, so would you say it’s the parent’s responsibility to monitor their children’s internet usage since they gave them a network-connected device?” “You obviously don’t want to protect kids!” Look, I do want to protect kids. I really do, but I also am sick and tired of bad actors using “BuT tHe ChIlDrEn” to recruit idiots and -phobes in a quest to make the entire planet and all of its spaces magically safe for children of all ages - at the expense of the superior number of adults who need our own spaces devoid of kids for community, for socialization, for being our full, human selves. The internet already has an age gate, and it’s called “the adults paying the damn bills”. Those adults are responsible for making internet access safe for kids, not the entire digital planet dropping what it’s doing to make every single private space safe for kids to access without parental supervision. Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it. Most of humanity grew up just fine without regular internet access as children, and there’s no reason whatsoever we have to foist net-connected terminals onto kids of any age. That’s parental choice, and I refuse to be punished because of someone else’s bad parenting.

iamnothere 11mo ago
> Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it. This comment should be highlighted on a forum like this. There is absolutely a business opportunity here, and it would double as a public service. You might even be able to get some grants for it!
- RandomBacon 11mo ago
  Cell phone companies like AT&T could offer kid-lines (with filtered Internet access) and Google and Apple could provide kid-modes on their phones that don't allow VPNs or apps to be installed that parents do not approve of. Maybe there might already be ways to prevent VPNs/apps, but it doesn't seem to be easy and/or publicized.
  - iamnothere 11mo ago
    Either a kid phone built on AOSP or a kid-focused MDM system, coupled with kid-focused apps, would seem to be sufficient. No need to go to the carriers.
  - trashb 11mo ago
    Don't worry the kid mode is coming on all devices, one thing you wouldn't want kids doing is sideloading applications after all. I think this is the wrong approach, an example is youtube kids. There seems to be a abundance of inappropriate content for kids on there. These companies don't actually care about you or your kids they care about profit. Only (hopefully most) parents care about their kids. They have the power to push a solution as a collective so the solution should empower them to choose and not not take power away from them and others (for example adults without kids). The age verification mandated on a government level constitutes to limiting access to content, and in my eyes that is censorship.
- stego-tech 11mo ago
  I’ve thought about it, but that’s still technology trying to solve a societal problem, and my experience is that doesn’t work (it just makes someone a lot of money by giving them data to exploit). Don’t get me wrong, I am still all for said services existing as an option for parents to leverage, but it’s not my thing. My soapbox is addressing the crux of the social problem: we have built a society where both parents in most families have to work full-time jobs to have a chance at making ends meet, increasingly taking on extra overtime or gig work to improve their odds of paying the bills. This means children have no consistent adult available in their lives to engage with them: nurture, monitor, teach, mentor, demonstrate, assist, etc. I want to build a society where only one parent has to work, and the other (whoever they are, I am not advocating a return to “traditional gender role” bullshit) can stay at home full-time. This way someone is always available to engage with the child and ensure their safety at home, with the suite of knock-on benefits that entails for the child’s development. I don’t want to make a child-safe planet at the expense of children lacking present and available parents; I want a world where parents aren’t so wiped from working multiple jobs and struggling to pay rent or buy food that their children become a forced secondary concern.
  - iamnothere 11mo ago
    I would also like to see this happen, but the developed world as a whole seems to be moving away from single working parents. Even across very different cultures. I’d like to see a change, but I’m not sure how it could happen. The closest thing we have is the stay at home working parent, which has grown after COVID. This is a lot better than neither parent being at home, but unless it’s a very easy job, they still won’t be able to supervise much. I also think some of these newer “email jobs” are facing competition from overseas workers and AI. Unless politicians learn to find value in having a stay at home parent, and supporting that through policy, these jobs may go away as quickly as they arrived.
    - stego-tech 11mo ago
      I think the stay-at-home working parent idea is a good one as a transition stage, but ultimately this is a large problem that'll require years of reforms and fundamental changes to accomplish - a plurality of society must be on board and willing to sacrifice to make it happen, because employers never will be despite the research data showing the benefits of these approaches. It's hard playing the long game, but we need more folks to do it. The big, important problems of life are never solved in a single fiscal year, after all.
pyuser583 11mo ago
No no no. Many schools require students to have Chromebooks that use Google Classroom. In the state I live in, public education is a constitutional. Yet the state can predicate my child’s constitutional rights on using Google Classroom. Google Classroom also has workaround that expose kids to harmful materials. While homeschooling is an option, I have a constitutional right to send my kids to public school. The school lends them free notebooks, which they then control. Some have strict settings - not enough to prevent toxic content - while others let lots of crap in. All without me spending a dime.
- stego-tech 11mo ago
  Then I would say that communities and administrators need to do a better job of restricting the internet access of those devices they provide kids, rather than punishing the outside world for the bad decisions of a handful of adults in neglecting their obligations. My schools implemented restricted ISPs with curated content as I was growing up, and eventually just a basic DNS filter by the time I reached HS. My current employer implements similar DNS checks on the firewall to block social media sites and, presumably, adult content (I’m not dumb enough to test the latter). My schools also had no problem providing local storage and collaboration tooling without internet access, so perhaps the argument should be made that schools shouldn’t be getting kids hooked on Big Tech cloud services a la iPads and Chromebooks, especially when children and parents become captive markets via school equipment mandates. Maybe we should be loaning out Linux laptops without WiFi or Ethernet ports with “Internet in a Box” preloaded on them for reference material, rather than shoving kids out into the wild internet absent guidance and context. I also flatly refuse the whole “we ID people in real life all the time” argument. The physical world is a default shared space, with finite boundaries and clear obligations. The digital world is the exact opposite: vague, nebulous, ever-shifting and changing, with no clear demarcation between states, or countries, or people. That argument reveals a complete misunderstanding of why physical ID checks work and digital ones never, ever will at scale, and I refuse to entertain anything predicated upon it. And here’s the dirty, nasty, disgusting little secret that parents don’t seem to realize or care about: bad actors in education are leveraging the fact kids have internet devices to spy on them. I’ve had CIO-equivalents in public and private education ask me to build surveillance tools to scan messages and photos on students’ private devices when connected to school networks under the guise of “safety”, which I refused to do because hell naw does anyone other than parents need full access to a child’s device. I have worked in the education sector, I have seen first hand the mismatch between the goals of parents, the needs of children, and the ambitions of grotesquely underpaid technical talent and the resultant quality of candidates that often seems to attract (or lack thereof - no disrespect to the good ones out there, but ya’ll are the fringe minority based on my experiences). Website age checks aren’t protecting kids, they’re harming adults. And bad adults are exploiting this knowledge gap to harm kids, too.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
You dont have kids do you. My first exception: school homework now done on PC. school requires laptop they can use in classroom. Friends. Now yeah blame the parents. But we already restrict alcohol to minors (but what stupid parent gave their kid money!) why not addictive, manipulative apps. Tldr. Kids need devices of some sort to do life these days. Pare nts will monitor and restrict. But we can also clear the dealers from the corners. That helps too.
- stego-tech 11mo ago
  > You dont have kids do you. That line right there sank your entire argument, because A) you don’t have to have kids to want to protect kids, and B) it makes the position that anyone without kids should have no say in how those with kids rear and raise their children, which could be (and is often) dangerously expanded to oppose Doctors, Teachers, Social Workers, and other people in other professions or knowledge areas solely because they’re childless. Be better.
  - aidenn0 11mo ago
    A more generous reading of this is "If you were around kids more, you would probably understand that kids have internet access even without their parent's permission and/or help" At least some of this access is essentially state-mandated, as it happens at public schools, which you are required to send your kids to unless you have the resources to arrange alternative education.
    - stego-tech 11mo ago
      I don’t give generous readings to bad arguments from online anons. The point of anonymous discourse is to come at it with your best arguments and debate them thoroughly, which is why there’s a lot of discussion about common methods of “bad faith” argument styles like the preceding commenter used (“you don’t have kids” = “your opinion is irrelevant”). Also, a lot of folks are making some assumptions about my person and profession to suit their own arguments, rather than discuss the merits of what I raised. These assumptions ultimately destroy their own arguments by showing a resultant lack of curiosity and a reliance on pre-existing narratives rather than carefully thought out rationale. That’s why these ID checks keep winning: suckers drinking the Kool-Aid without thinking for themselves and dismissing what they perceive to be opposition, who in reality have more experience with this with kids and in education than they assume when dismissing our positions. I don’t need to be more understanding of bad actors or bad arguments, they need to be better at discussing their positions rationally or trusting experts who have lived these problems.
aidenn0 11mo ago
I'm also opposed to this law (mainly I think it is a huge invasion of privacy with near zero chance of actually protecting kids), but there are some realities people should know. My kids were all exposed to some relatively extreme stuff long before they had a network connected device (starting around 1st grade). This is because other kids at school had network connected devices, and some of those kids show other kids stuff for shock value. In a more extreme instance, the child did pay for internet access; they got an old phone from a friend and paid cash for a sim card.

iamnothere 11mo ago

> Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it. This comment should be highlighted on a forum like this. There is absolutely a business opportunity here, and it would double as a public service. You might even be able to get some grants for it!

RandomBacon 11mo ago
Cell phone companies like AT&T could offer kid-lines (with filtered Internet access) and Google and Apple could provide kid-modes on their phones that don't allow VPNs or apps to be installed that parents do not approve of. Maybe there might already be ways to prevent VPNs/apps, but it doesn't seem to be easy and/or publicized.
- iamnothere 11mo ago
  Either a kid phone built on AOSP or a kid-focused MDM system, coupled with kid-focused apps, would seem to be sufficient. No need to go to the carriers.
- trashb 11mo ago
  Don't worry the kid mode is coming on all devices, one thing you wouldn't want kids doing is sideloading applications after all. I think this is the wrong approach, an example is youtube kids. There seems to be a abundance of inappropriate content for kids on there. These companies don't actually care about you or your kids they care about profit. Only (hopefully most) parents care about their kids. They have the power to push a solution as a collective so the solution should empower them to choose and not not take power away from them and others (for example adults without kids). The age verification mandated on a government level constitutes to limiting access to content, and in my eyes that is censorship.
stego-tech 11mo ago
I’ve thought about it, but that’s still technology trying to solve a societal problem, and my experience is that doesn’t work (it just makes someone a lot of money by giving them data to exploit). Don’t get me wrong, I am still all for said services existing as an option for parents to leverage, but it’s not my thing. My soapbox is addressing the crux of the social problem: we have built a society where both parents in most families have to work full-time jobs to have a chance at making ends meet, increasingly taking on extra overtime or gig work to improve their odds of paying the bills. This means children have no consistent adult available in their lives to engage with them: nurture, monitor, teach, mentor, demonstrate, assist, etc. I want to build a society where only one parent has to work, and the other (whoever they are, I am not advocating a return to “traditional gender role” bullshit) can stay at home full-time. This way someone is always available to engage with the child and ensure their safety at home, with the suite of knock-on benefits that entails for the child’s development. I don’t want to make a child-safe planet at the expense of children lacking present and available parents; I want a world where parents aren’t so wiped from working multiple jobs and struggling to pay rent or buy food that their children become a forced secondary concern.
- iamnothere 11mo ago
  I would also like to see this happen, but the developed world as a whole seems to be moving away from single working parents. Even across very different cultures. I’d like to see a change, but I’m not sure how it could happen. The closest thing we have is the stay at home working parent, which has grown after COVID. This is a lot better than neither parent being at home, but unless it’s a very easy job, they still won’t be able to supervise much. I also think some of these newer “email jobs” are facing competition from overseas workers and AI. Unless politicians learn to find value in having a stay at home parent, and supporting that through policy, these jobs may go away as quickly as they arrived.
  - stego-tech 11mo ago
    I think the stay-at-home working parent idea is a good one as a transition stage, but ultimately this is a large problem that'll require years of reforms and fundamental changes to accomplish - a plurality of society must be on board and willing to sacrifice to make it happen, because employers never will be despite the research data showing the benefits of these approaches. It's hard playing the long game, but we need more folks to do it. The big, important problems of life are never solved in a single fiscal year, after all.

pyuser583 11mo ago

No no no. Many schools require students to have Chromebooks that use Google Classroom. In the state I live in, public education is a constitutional. Yet the state can predicate my child’s constitutional rights on using Google Classroom. Google Classroom also has workaround that expose kids to harmful materials. While homeschooling is an option, I have a constitutional right to send my kids to public school. The school lends them free notebooks, which they then control. Some have strict settings - not enough to prevent toxic content - while others let lots of crap in. All without me spending a dime.

stego-tech 11mo ago
Then I would say that communities and administrators need to do a better job of restricting the internet access of those devices they provide kids, rather than punishing the outside world for the bad decisions of a handful of adults in neglecting their obligations. My schools implemented restricted ISPs with curated content as I was growing up, and eventually just a basic DNS filter by the time I reached HS. My current employer implements similar DNS checks on the firewall to block social media sites and, presumably, adult content (I’m not dumb enough to test the latter). My schools also had no problem providing local storage and collaboration tooling without internet access, so perhaps the argument should be made that schools shouldn’t be getting kids hooked on Big Tech cloud services a la iPads and Chromebooks, especially when children and parents become captive markets via school equipment mandates. Maybe we should be loaning out Linux laptops without WiFi or Ethernet ports with “Internet in a Box” preloaded on them for reference material, rather than shoving kids out into the wild internet absent guidance and context. I also flatly refuse the whole “we ID people in real life all the time” argument. The physical world is a default shared space, with finite boundaries and clear obligations. The digital world is the exact opposite: vague, nebulous, ever-shifting and changing, with no clear demarcation between states, or countries, or people. That argument reveals a complete misunderstanding of why physical ID checks work and digital ones never, ever will at scale, and I refuse to entertain anything predicated upon it. And here’s the dirty, nasty, disgusting little secret that parents don’t seem to realize or care about: bad actors in education are leveraging the fact kids have internet devices to spy on them. I’ve had CIO-equivalents in public and private education ask me to build surveillance tools to scan messages and photos on students’ private devices when connected to school networks under the guise of “safety”, which I refused to do because hell naw does anyone other than parents need full access to a child’s device. I have worked in the education sector, I have seen first hand the mismatch between the goals of parents, the needs of children, and the ambitions of grotesquely underpaid technical talent and the resultant quality of candidates that often seems to attract (or lack thereof - no disrespect to the good ones out there, but ya’ll are the fringe minority based on my experiences). Website age checks aren’t protecting kids, they’re harming adults. And bad adults are exploiting this knowledge gap to harm kids, too.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago

You dont have kids do you. My first exception: school homework now done on PC. school requires laptop they can use in classroom. Friends. Now yeah blame the parents. But we already restrict alcohol to minors (but what stupid parent gave their kid money!) why not addictive, manipulative apps. Tldr. Kids need devices of some sort to do life these days. Pare nts will monitor and restrict. But we can also clear the dealers from the corners. That helps too.

stego-tech 11mo ago
> You dont have kids do you. That line right there sank your entire argument, because A) you don’t have to have kids to want to protect kids, and B) it makes the position that anyone without kids should have no say in how those with kids rear and raise their children, which could be (and is often) dangerously expanded to oppose Doctors, Teachers, Social Workers, and other people in other professions or knowledge areas solely because they’re childless. Be better.
- aidenn0 11mo ago
  A more generous reading of this is "If you were around kids more, you would probably understand that kids have internet access even without their parent's permission and/or help" At least some of this access is essentially state-mandated, as it happens at public schools, which you are required to send your kids to unless you have the resources to arrange alternative education.
  - stego-tech 11mo ago
    I don’t give generous readings to bad arguments from online anons. The point of anonymous discourse is to come at it with your best arguments and debate them thoroughly, which is why there’s a lot of discussion about common methods of “bad faith” argument styles like the preceding commenter used (“you don’t have kids” = “your opinion is irrelevant”). Also, a lot of folks are making some assumptions about my person and profession to suit their own arguments, rather than discuss the merits of what I raised. These assumptions ultimately destroy their own arguments by showing a resultant lack of curiosity and a reliance on pre-existing narratives rather than carefully thought out rationale. That’s why these ID checks keep winning: suckers drinking the Kool-Aid without thinking for themselves and dismissing what they perceive to be opposition, who in reality have more experience with this with kids and in education than they assume when dismissing our positions. I don’t need to be more understanding of bad actors or bad arguments, they need to be better at discussing their positions rationally or trusting experts who have lived these problems.

aidenn0 11mo ago

I'm also opposed to this law (mainly I think it is a huge invasion of privacy with near zero chance of actually protecting kids), but there are some realities people should know. My kids were all exposed to some relatively extreme stuff long before they had a network connected device (starting around 1st grade). This is because other kids at school had network connected devices, and some of those kids show other kids stuff for shock value. In a more extreme instance, the child did pay for internet access; they got an old phone from a friend and paid cash for a sim card.