Many US states planning or have operating system age verification laws

There also seem to be a great deal of politicians who basically just do whatever their donors and lobbyists tell them without any critical thought

Basically just puppets for wealthy financial interests, which are harder and harder to organize and combat

This reasoning never made sense to me. What the hell are these kids' parents doing and why is this something that needs to inconvenience everyone else? If lazy parents don't want to monitor their children while they spend all day on their ipads, that's their problem--it shouldn't be made mine.

> Most people are getting seriously concerned about how the internet affects children. It's as simple as that.

I'm also extremely concerned about what social media is doing to children's brains and how that manifests in their adulthood. I'm also concerned about how they affect adult brains, because I see it negatively affecting the decisions of even seniors.

But it's not "as simple as that". These sorts of solutions have serious consequences on civil liberty, privacy, security, affordability of general purpose computing, fair-use access to uaeful information, restrictions on state-sponsored information control, etc. This isn't a black-and-white problem.

> it's hard to just say "well, the cure it worse then the disease, suck it up".

Just as the problem is not black-and-white, the solution isn't either. There are a lot of steps to try before that. One is to try an awareness campaign among kids about the dangers of social media. It's a bit arrogant to believe that kids don't care about their own safety. Another is to assist parents with supervision and parental controls. Instead, they just jumped directly to the nuclear option. This kind of rhetorical framing of the opposition hides the likely nefarious intent behind such despotic measures.

> A lot of people assume politicians are just greedy for power and are conspiring to give the government more surveillance power, but the simplest explanation here is that politicians are being screamed at to do something, and this is something.

You paint both parents and politicians as naïve individuals. There are plenty of parents who can see the problem, since they're Gen X and millenials who grew up observing the change. Meanwhile, assumption of incompetence among politicians is defeated by the fact that much public debate about it is missing here. And the fact that multiple states are coming up with similar bills, indicates the influence of lobbyists. Besides, the US politicians are not exactly known for defending the citizen's rights against corporate interests. They deserve a heavy dose of skepticism and criticism, not the benefit of doubt.

That is not something that should be controlled by an IT company, ISP, or an OS. I think parents have a responsibility to control (or at least influence) their childeren's content consumption. Companies like Google and Apple provide built-in parental controls and digital wellbeing apps, you can also use something like OpenDNS or control it via some other means. If a kid has unrestricted internet access and screen time, the parents are being neglectful. Obviously there should be some regulatory action to force companies to not make their apps addictive or harmful in some ways (including to minors), but not through age checks in an OS... The bill is kind of confusing, but from what I understand, it doesn't require ID checks, so as a convenience to not have to worry about kids having access to things they shouldn't it is not that awful (just put any age number you want when configuring OS). But implementing this is impossible (how do you force all programs to not show things that are not for "a user is in any of several age brackets"). It shouldn't be an OS requirement, maybe an optional feature that the state advises major OSs to have. Also some OSs are not for personal use, and nowadays a toaster may have an OS...

[dead]

Man, I hope some of the "negative social consequences" more directly affect some of the politicians involved before they can implement this :)

[dead]