Comment by fc417fc802

> small personal website operators shouldn't be in the position of being forced to determine whether the random stuff on their personal website is specifically suitable for 13+, 18+, etc.

Agreed, but I take that a step farther and apply it to all operators. It's one thing to have a tag "18+ in the US" for when an operator is reasonably certain that his content is not legal to provide to minors. But the vast majority of the time operators should not be expected to be legal experts and they certainly can't be expected to keep up with all the different jurisdictions of the world.

Keep in mind the motivating issue here is parents filtering the content that their children are routinely exposed to. Everyone will inevitably have different concerns and standards, ex no social media versus no user generated content whatsoever versus 1 hour of social media or games or whatever per day. It's content awareness that's missing here. Everyone with legal concerns already posts a disclaimer that you have to click through and if they really care they send the RTA header.

> attempting to do is kind of specious based on the existence of foreign sites.

If the major browser vendors require it to load a page at all then it immediately becomes a de facto global requirement.

> The difficulty with forcing some uniform mandate onto "all sites" is that the mandate has to be for tags that are faithfully stated

One of the tags would amount to "not applicable". If a bunch of small time operators would prefer to be blocked by default and not think about the content they post then they could coordinate to create their own tag for that. The first step is uniform adoption then after that governments can penalize noncompliance in the form of inaccurate tags. I don't expect the latter would be much of an issue in practice though. Most people aren't going to intentionally misconfigure something but lazily not bothering in the first place is all too common.