> a statement like “we should stop young kids watching porn” is so agreeable that only the nuttiest amongst us could even begin to disagree with it
I mostly disagree with it. I don't want prepubescent children watching porn of course, but the vast majority of them aren't doing that with any regularity, nor do they have any desire to. It isn't a problem that demands a robust solution with serious downsides.
I do think an HTTP header saying "no adult content" that can be turned on via both simple browser settings and password-protected parental controls is a good idea. That would reduce accidental or casual exposure to porn and have no meaningful downsides.
Since gambling laws have been relaxed in a number of countries over the last few years, there has been a rather concerning rise in teenage gambling addiction.
This is perhaps a better example than porn. I'd be much more worried about my 14-year old spending all of their (or my) money on gambling than having a wank every once in a while.
That said, I have accidentally landed on porn sites over the years (including in a demo in front of the entire company haha). I'm not part of the hyper-prudish American contingent where any form of nudity does irreparable trauma to a child, but ... there's some pretty wild stuff out there. It's not like when I was young and stay up late to sneakily watch a soft-core porn at midnight.
I'd prefer the HTTP header be on the response. That way, it can't be used for fingerprinting and can easily put the website in a more fine grained category (e.g., porn, gore, political extremism) and the user agent can be configured to filter based on this. You could then create limited but present liability for mislabeling.
I'd be worried that doing that would invite bad followups - e.g. requiring web browsers to block tagged content by default (or always), defining LGBT or other politically sensitive content as pornographic and mandating that it be tagged, penalizing web site operators for failing to tag their web sites, etc.
But in principle, I still agree. As someone who has managed some adult-oriented spaces online, I would love to have a way to put a sign on the door that, in effect, says "adults only", and have it be technically enforced for users who have chosen to do so.
This is another reason to do it as a header -- you can make lgbt its own category, instead of pretending that it's porn. This isn't perfect though, since children need to be able to learn about that even if their parents are bigots. The child could themselves be lgbt, and honest information instead of rumors of taboo can help them not develop similar bigotry.
You’d have to come up with a technical spec on the category definitions though. For example, what is porn and what is political extremism? That has always been the struggle.
How about a header giving the minimum age.
> I mostly disagree with it. I don't want prepubescent children watching porn of course, but the vast majority of them aren't doing that with any regularity,
This genuinely needs qualification and I suspect, based on discussions I have had with friends who are teachers and teaching assistants, that you would be horrified by how often very young children (seven, eight, nine years old) are viewing material that only a couple of generations ago would not have been seen in any legal publication in the UK.
> It isn't a problem that demands a robust solution with serious downsides.
This is an opinion, not a fact. I think I disagree, but I also disagree that websites asking you to verify you can access a particular link on a mobile device is a particularly serious downside (since that is one of the valid ways of age attestation in the UK -- it requires only that your mobile phone provider knows you are an adult, which they can establish in a number of ways).