> But wait! That's not all! The CnaM Executive Chairman wanted to talk about porn sites because that's the least popular class of entities covered by this regulation. But the age-verification requirement actually can cover any video-sharing platform under the jurisdiction of the Irish State (link to the designation notice under section 139E and section 139G of the Broadcasting 2009 Act). That's a list that includes Facebook, WhatsApp, XTwitter and YouTube, just to pick four household names (because of Section 5 of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022). It might also mean homegrown platforms such as Mastodon.ie, the most prominent Irish part of the Fediverse, who also allow videos to be shared.

...

> Also, these restrictions won't just limit and record access to porn sites. They can be applied to any sites which contains material the Commission decides may be legal, but on the other hand, oughtn't be seen by children. In other countries, this has been the kind of legal provision which has seen libraries restricting access to books involving LGBTQ+ themes, racial justice themes and anything else you could imagine the Burke family objecting to.

Protecting children is the emotional wedge for introducing age verification requirements. Video sites are the wedge into all internet sites. The legislators' emphasis on porn is a wedge into any speech (including otherwise legal speech) the government claims is harmful for children. That government-mandated age verification would protect children is an assumption, full of uncertainty of the beneficial first-order effects and full of ignorance (willful blindness?) of the obvious detrimental second-order effects. Mandatory age verification requires mandatory data collection, and strangers are going to read that data: some first-party websites will be forced to collect more information than they currently do; third-party websites involved in the collection and verification processes will collect data as well; and the government will get information about the citizens' internet habits from websites. Adults will lose their privacy because people who have no business knowing their internet habits will know them.

Children will lose their privacy, and more. They will grow up learning that it's normal to give their personal information (including but not limited to relatively immutable biological details such as faceprints) to strangers. They will grow up learning that it's normal for the government to know every website a person visits online. The offline analogue is for the government to know every building a person visits offline. No matter how noble the current government's current intentions may be, a stranger has by default no right to know that much about a person's life.

Movie theatres can show childrens' films and adult films. The movie theatre doesn't have to store anything about age other than "minor" and "adult". Libraries and bookstores can contain childrens' books and adult books. Malls contain stores for many audiences. Clothing stores have sections for children's clothes, modest adult clothes, and risque adult clothes. You know what the normal way for a child to visit many such buildings is? A caretaker (maybe a parent, but not every child has a parent) brings the child and supervises. On the other side of the equation, it would not be normal for a mall to collect people's ages at the mall entrance (the adult-only stores inside being a different story).

A website should have the option to verify age, and the alternative option to require no more than a self-reported "are you at least 18? yes no". Government-mandated age verification is burdensome to small websites, especially small platforms for user-generated content. If a website could choose to remove potentially harmful content instead of verifying age, then the burden would still be too large for small websites. Might as well not host user-generated content at all. Large internet companies like Google and Facebook would eat the costs either way. Small websites would have to rely on third-party age verification services. Software for age verification will be predominantly proprietary or not available to the general netizen or both, so the average person won't be able to know how much information the websites collect and store. What's more, lawyers and judges in privacy-related or accuracy-related court cases (especially regarding biometric verification) will have a hard time examining the software.

Making every website collect information the way a bank does is applying a hammer to problems that are not nails. Don't make the entire internet a bank. And as Mike Masnick wrote, "The Internet Is Not Disneyland; People Should Stop Demanding It Become Disneyland" [1]. "Are you at least 18? yes no" paired with proper parenting/caretaking can go a long way. Proper caretaking is not simply knowing what the child does on the internet. It's knowing that the child might visit the internet while the caretaker is occupied. It's teaching the child early on that not all websites are for children. It's setting up parental controls while understanding that parental controls are imperfect, like one slice of Swiss cheese [2]. You are a Swiss cheese layer. By teaching your child what to do if they stumble upon the wrong websites, you will be turning your child from a hula hoop into their own Swiss cheese layer. When you find out that your child stumbled upon porn, you can talk to your child about the incident. As a caretaker, damage control is a necessary part of determining healthy boundaries. Additionally, I don't expect the damage to a younger child from accidentally viewing porn to be as proportionately severe as the damage to an under-21 college freshman from drinking alcohol at a party. You can't talk brain damage from drugs out of someone. But I'm assuming that you can talk the harm from an accidental porn incident out of your child.

I like the idea posed by mjevans [3] to make websites respond to a self-reported "kid mode" - as a header in a web request, I presume - by redirecting to a child-friendly site. Websites could also respond by serving only content manually confirmed to be child-safe according to the website's interpretation of the law's definition of child-safe. As part of supporting the "kid mode" header, the website would have to respond with a "kid mode" confirmed. Parental controls on the device would include the "kid mode" header in all web requests whenever kid mode is on. If the website doesn't return the "kid mode confirmed" header then the parental controls can cancel the website visit. Adults would simply leave kid mode off for themselves. The burden on websites (learning how to send a 301 redirect status code at the simplest) would very low, and would avoid the data collection and other privacy problems of age verification.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/09/20/the-internet-is-not-disn...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38903965