Comment by elric
10 days ago
I'm getting pretty tired of the EU trying to shove internet-crippling regulations down my throat. This, along with ChatControl, is clearly a path towards totalitarian control.
Who are the politicians making these decisions? How did they get elected? Did anyone vote for Totalitarianism 2.0?
Politicians are all that stands between corporations and absolute corruption. It's why they're both their primary target and the ambition of greedy people.
> I'm getting pretty tired of the EU trying to shove internet-crippling regulations down my throat
And I'm getting tired of people pulling out pitchforks without reading anything. This is how democracies end up electing people like Trump. There are no regulations to require age verification here. The EU is simply giving guidelines for implementing harmonized age verification across the EU if any member states or companies that do business in the EU want to use it instead of making people scan ID cards like they currently do and making the receiver of said scans have to understand updates to the designs of the various ID cards used throughout the EU.
Oh come on. You know exactly where this is going. Porn and social media will require age verification before you can say "who voted for this?".
You know you're making a fallacious slippery slope argument here. Age verification is already a thing on the Internet, and South Korea and Texas already require age verification for those things. Providing a proof of concept for a way to do age verification without handing over your identity doesn't change public policy. The voters decide what needs age verification.
If you're concerned about totalitarianism, you should be more concerned that Texas required people to upload their IDs to access porn sites because that was the only method available.
Governments are reflection of their people, like it or not.
Are they, though? The people don't elect the European Commission. The European Council selects candidates and the European Parliament can vote for them. The people in the European Parliament are often politicians who no one knows but sort of vote for because they're associated with their preferred party.
I don't recall any party campaigning on reducing internet freedoms.