Comment by ExoticPearTree

3 days ago

Too many people expressing themselves on the internet with nothing that can be done against them...

From a government perspective, it is a gold mine to know who's on the internet. For advertisers it is another goldmine - you can target at will without having to figure out first some demographics. An probably there are some angles I don't yet see, but the fact that this is a concentrated effort across the world make my spidey sense tingle.

And who doesn't want to protect the children?

2 comments

ExoticPearTree

odyssey7 3 days ago

For the deep-pocked advertisers, this is a loss.

Because big players have systems to fill in those information gaps, they have a moat that protects their position in the market.

If the data were instead just handed over, that would weaken those moats.

cowboylowrez 3 days ago

I agree with this especially as these laws specifically still allow kids to carry smartphones and use them away from parents watchful eye. There is no protection here. Get the kids off of the internet, there is nothing good for them there.

Now as I've thought this through some, I could see where selected networking could be made kid friendly, you know, like a top level dns where you need to prove yourself to be underage or heavily vetted adult with id verification, and this entire tld could be made kid friendly. I don't doubt that most of today's dns infrastructure is probably not up to the job, but a very tight and heavily vetted registry for .kids for example (or maybe better as kids.<country> as laws vary) would solve all of this. Make a subset of the internet kid safe and serve the kids that.

The fact that all these proposed laws still give kids general tcp/ip access at the physical level means we do conclude exactly what my parent commenter says, its not really about the kids, its about the free and unfettered flow of information that must be stopped. In the US, its getting close to illegal to disseminate information but once factual information does indeed become criminal in nature, you need to catch the perps and thus the IDs attached to packets of fact carrying information.