Comment by AnthonyMouse

> Is that really a non-sequitur though?

You have something (human communication) which is not intrinsically harmful -- indeed it is intrinsically necessary -- but has been made harmful on purpose. That is very much unlike those other things, where the harm is in their very nature and isn't prevented by the provider just not being a schmuck on purpose.

That makes age gating a farce, because kids need to be able to communicate with other people, but you would end up in one of these scenarios, each of which is inane: 1) Providers all put up age restrictions and meaningfully enforce them and then teenagers are totally prohibited from communicating over the internet. 2) Providers all put up "age restrictions" which teenagers bypass in ten seconds and the whole thing is a pointless fraud. 3) You try to separate places for kids from places for adults, but then either a) Adults prefer adult spaces where they're not censored, so they congregate there and those spaces get the network effect, and then teens have to sneak in even if they're not looking for adult content because that's where the bulk of all content is, or b) Nobody likes to show ID even if they're an adult so adults congregate in the least restrictively moderated space where they don't have to show ID, and that space gets the network effect. Then to the extent that they censor, they're censoring the adults which is the thing that wasn't supposed to happen, and to the extent that they don't censor, you have a "kid space" that contains adult content.

It's a trash fire specifically because there's a network effect, which is an aggregating force causing adults and kids to be in the same space so they can communicate with each other. Then the space with the network effect would either have to censor the adults even though they can't leave because of the network effect, or not censor the adults and then have adult content in the space the kids have to be because of the network effect.

The way you fix this is not by trying to separate the kids ad adults into separate networks, it's by tagging specific content so the client device can choose not to display adult content if they're a kid. Which also solves the privacy issue because you don't have to provide any ID to the service when the choice of what content to display happens on the client and the service is only tasked with identifying the content.