Comment by The_President
14 hours ago
False analogy given by this federal judge. App stores are gateways to social environments and unknown or future content. Every book in a bookstore can be verified because the content can be known and audited. Regardless of opinion on the root issue, this judges statement aligns books with the Internet and they are absolutely not the same.
Yes, but you can't stop eight year olds from grabbing a James Patterson or Stephen King novel from the shelf. Their parents should, and some librarians might throw a moral exception to their choice, but if they wanna read It, they're gonna read It.
Enforcing anything other than that is a huge 1A violation IMO.
"you can't stop eight year old from ..."
Phrasing this as "you" versus "a second party to the child" involves me, where I originally did not present a statement that would give the impression that I'd be involved. Keep me - "you" - out of it. I'm simply making fun of this analogy.
> Every book in a bookstore can be verified because the content can be known and audited
A bookstore with a single employee can no more verify the content of every new book or periodical put up for sale than Apple can verify all new content on the internet.
Books and periodicals come out far, far too quickly for an independently owned bookstore to read first. Never mind new books which have set release dates where bookstores might not get advanced copies for books sold on consignment.
That’s an argument that sounds convincing in principle, but in reality I can walk into any independent bookstore and find it’s not filled with porn and AI slop, so clearly there is a successful vetting process going on. Namely, the publishers vet the books then the bookstore owner only has to vet the publishers. A proof of concept internet equivalent is if I scrape a bunch of trusted YouTube channels onto a NAS and give my kids access to that NAS but block YouTube access otherwise.
With that argument you could argue for age gating wifi access and mobile data.
Bookstore and libraries are environments where content is known. I am not making any sort of argument that identifies internet access as something to age gate.
Correct analogies should be used to present the most fool proof argument.
Who cares if you don't like his analogy? His point is that this is a violation of the 1st Amendment. Which, by the way, does not mention anything about content being known or not.
1 reply →
Have you read the opinion?
Yes and I am addressing the quoted remark above which stands out.