Comment by foldr
8 days ago
I don’t support this legislation, but I think your argument is weak because everything relating to age checks is full of holes in all kinds of contexts. People under 18 can obtain alcohol and cigarettes without extraordinary difficulty, for example. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the laws requiring age checks for these items should be repealed.
I think this sounds similar on the surface but the nature of the distribution of physical goods and digital media are so different that the premise doesn't actually hold up. Age verification has a meaningful impact in the physical world because supply of goods is limited by physical process and marginal costs of supply/production. Reproduction and sharing of digital media, especially illicit digital media, is essentially free and limitless, and can be done by anyone and even be done anonymously or pseudonymously. You can't just link hundreds of people to a single unregulated bottle of beer you found out about but you can do that to a site hosting some adult content. The dynamics are totally different.
To an extent, but people can’t have this both ways. If the checks really are trivial to get around then why complain about them? In reality we know that most people are lazy and have poor technical skills, so it’s rather likely that this will substantially reduce the amount of porn that under 18s are accessing.
I think this is wishful thinking. Using a VPN is very much so within the capability of normal mobile users today and many people are aware of them (wide advertising on social media, news articles, discussions, etc.). It's not harder than installing e.g. WhatsApp or TikTok. Couple that with the Streisand effect and just normal teenage rebellion behaviour and honestly it could lead to an increase.
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